Hallowed World
by The Mustachioed Cat
Summary: An Alternate Reality Evangelion Tale. COMPLETE
1. Sea and Earth

Hallowed World

Chapter One

Sea and Earth

I.

Wind and earth borne on wind filled her vision. For a moment that expected terror seized her, and then there was a voice somewhere nearby, telling her it was fine, she was safe.

The girl let the itching sensation in her chest clear, and tried to get her breathing under control. The terror diffused into the liquid around her, ego and certainty filling that gaping void. She was invincible, not even the awful conditions Outside could harm her.

The voice over the com continued inane reassurances, already growing grainy and faint. She silenced the dying echo with a sharp command, and then disengaged the safety locks binding her to the transport. Shut off the optical feed of the outside and engaged the topographic map.

She deployed.

Progress was slow and bracing, but easy enough. She actually enjoyed an opportunity to flex her knowledge, making minute adjustments from moment to moment to maximize efficiency. The beginning and end of her journey were the only portions that would require anything like skill, the interim being a long and tedious journey that simply required her presence.

It took her an hour to reach the forward observation post, one of several squat granite structures that ringed the observation bunker, and shelter proper. A blue icon appeared on her display marking the building, and she carefully avoided it.

Another hour passed. More adjusting for variable conditions, several serious OS errors she would have to address in the interim, and numerous areas of geography inconsistent with the topographic database that she had to map out manually with radar. She still reveled in the challenge, and screamed obscenities against the savage winds and the barren earth as she typed and twisted and pushed.

It was with something like hatred that she finally acknowledged the ocean. The deep, unending depression on her topographic HUD could be nothing else. Below was the deep dark of the North Sea, silent straights and empty waters. There was little life below, even less sunlight. Just a perpetual rain of ash as the earth from the winds filtered down to settle on the ocean floor. Aside from a simple, strong signal, she would have no contact with the outside.

She stood on the edge, where earth met water, and triggered normal visual displays. It was only here, where the heat of the ocean pushed the air up and away, that she was afforded a glimpse of the true Outside. The nominal green wire-frame disappeared from her heads up display, and was replaced with blurry images of naked rock and ocean spray.

Fifteenth years ago the land on which she stood had been part of a bustling deep-water port, with a population of over three hundred thousand. Not a single trace of it remained. The buildings had toppled and blown away, their foundations long ago undermined and scavenged. The roads and docks and trees and houses were all gone as well. All that remained was the basic stuff on the planet; stone and sea.

Asuka Langley Sohryu turned from what had once been the city of Bremerhaven, and plunged into dark waters.

II.

Shinji Ikari was dreaming of a train car.

It was old fashioned, pre-Second Impact design. The interior was splashed in the orange-red light of an evening sun, which filtered in through large, unarmored windows. The shrill, haunting call of the train signal came and went.

To his right was the ghost of a landscape. Gently sloping hills, trees and grass and shrubbery, the occasional home... rural Japan. All bathed in the amber light of the setting star. There were no people, no cars, no animals.

To his left, the landscape continued on into an absolute dark. A gentle fade that started at the tracks continued on and away, into an endless night, without moon or stars.

It was only after taking in his surroundings, drunken in his dream-state, that Shinji noticed the other occupant of the train car. A young girl in a traditional school uniform sat opposite him, regarding him silently. Her face was framed in hair that might have been ghostly white, her eyes masked in shadow... yet he could see discern her focus, could feel it upon him.

She stood and slowly walked to him, hair falling forward until her entire face was hidden. Though the car rocked as it progressed down the tracks, the girl did not seem to acknowledge the gentle sway. Her path was set and sure, and when she stopped before him, she did so absolutely. Not a fold of clothing or strand of hair moved from it's place.

And then she spoke.

"Behold the past," the girl said, and gestured towards the setting sun. "Those pathetic, short lived creatures that dwelt in the light. Incomparable to our ancient enemy, just self-aware enough to be polluted with egotism and hubris. They are naught but a mistake, an experiment which outlived its creator."

The girl then pointed to the other side of the train, to the darkness. "Behold the future, a timeless place wherein our kind might thrive."

She lowered her hand, and was once again _still_. Then: "This is a difficult time, a delicate time. The creatures are small, but they will fight to continue to exist. They conceive of some idle bid for power, but in that they will not succeed."

And then her arms were around him, her face close to his. Angled upward, her hair fell away, the light touched her face, and Shinji saw that her eyes were blood red.

"Soon He shall be freed from his tomb." Her eyes clouded with tears, and a faint smile touched her lips. "Soon that delightful agony will wash over everything. Air will become stone. Stone will become air. The very fabric of reality will re-polarize. It will bend to our will."

The tears raced down her cheeks, appearing molten in the light of the evening sun. She brought her hands to Shinji's face and pulled him toward her. Her touch was cold and wet. It was at that touch that Shinji willed the gentle sway of the train car from him. It was at that touch that he started to seek an escape. To wake up.

"...and, in that orgy of creation, of death..." The girl leaned up to meet his face... he could feel her breath, could taste the scent of brine and wind-swept marble, an old graveyard by the sea "... the two of us will know each other." And when their lips came together, he knew the taste of corpseflesh.

III.

Somewhere beneath what had once been the state of New York, a sleek armored carrier sped on magnetic tracks. There were sixty people inside, all on various assignments for NERV or the UN. For most the transit was routine, a simple transfer between two shelters.

The main car would have been considered luxurious fifteen years ago. Plush furniture, heavy tan carpet, an open bar with everything from beer to straight whiskey, a large supply of recreational sedatives... but this was all a mask, a lie, to distract people from objectivity, from the truth of their situation.

All the alcohol and pot in the world did not change the fact that they were on a train, traveling under many metric tons of rock, beneath a world all of them had once known, now long dead. And there were the stories, rumors whispered in idle moments. Some trains never reached their destinations. There were vague accounts of the horrors recovery teams had uncovered, of living, babbling corpses and steel armor shorn away with careless ease.

And there was always the chance that there would be a tectonic event, a shift in the tunnel. The friction experienced while overcoming the effects of such activity would slow the magnetic train down. Each were powered by a very precise electrical charge, any slowing meant that the train would stop somewhere short of its destination. The cars would lose power, and the occupants would have to wait in darkness until the sending shelter sent enough current through the rail to jump-start the train, a ham-fisted bit of engineering that would probably drain the whole shelter system's grid.

Nothing like that had happened on the New York-Arkham line. Yet.

-

Of the fifty-two people officially aboard the train, thirty one were technicians escorting a prototype N2 power plant, ten were corporate-industrial transfers, and eleven were null-level civilians being transferred for personal reasons.

The remaining eight people were secreted away in a hidden car. Seven of those eight were professional soldiers in the service of NERV. The eighth was Shinji Ikari. While the NERV agents would have been described by an observer as security for the boy, Shinji himself considered them his captors.

Captive and keepers were both exhausted, having traveled by rail for more than two weeks. The soldiers, though hardened professionals, were distinctly on edge. They all remembered what had once been, and speeding beneath the ruins of Second Impact was starting to effect them in subtle and disturbing ways.

Ikari, too young to remember the splendors of civilization in excess, experienced no such cumulative trauma. That ignorance allowed him to embrace sleep far more easily than any of the professional soldiers. But he had his own ghosts as well.

His captors now glared at his sleeping form. Most wished he were out of sight. They were... uncomfortable with anyone, even a boy, who could carry himself so easily, so simply, through a passage in the long dark. They slept only when exhaustion overtook them, and then only for a few hours, at the most. Nearly all had been forty hours without sleep, and were sweaty and cold and twitchy.

So it did them credit, when Shinji Ikari exploded from the crash couch he had been sleeping on, screaming, that they didn't shoot him by reflex.

-

Shinji Ikari was a fifteen year-old boy that looked far older. His brown eyes had a certain dullness to them, his body leaner then even the strictest rationing could account for. His hair had once been rich chestnut, but was now spotted with gray and faded, the cause of which could have been the genetic produce Japan was subsisting on, or something else... something much worse.

He was the only known survivor of the First Shelter, mankind's prototype stronghold. Shinji was amnesiac of the events that had led to the fall of that shelter, to the complete slaughter of over thirty-thousand souls. How he escaped and managed to get to the underworks of a shelter a hundred miles distant was also unknown to him.

The only "clues" he had were shadowy dreams that were mostly emotion and sensation. They were things he could not articulate, even to himself, but he knew they were wrong on a primal level. In these dreams he sometimes heard chanting, sometimes laughter, sometimes screams... but he never saw anything. He was always blind in these dreams, and probably better for it.

Shinji had been twelve when the First Shelter had fallen, he was fifteen now. He had come to terms with his chronic dreams, learning to forget, and treasuring those few nights his sub-conscious lingered on sane, human things. He had his ghosts, yes, but he had learned to ignore them.

-

Some distance down the train track, earth shifted.

-

The impact itself was minor, a slight scrape against one of the tunnel's sides. But through the ventilation, shared between the cars, Shinji heard screams. The men around him did a poor job of looking unconcerned.

The electrical charge the train was riding on was now insufficient to push them to the receiving shelter. The train would eventually stop. The lights would go out... until their absence was noted downstream.

Shinji knew little of the inter-continental rail system. This was his first time on it, extended trip though it was. He did not know what the bump meant. Though he could feel the train slowing, could easily see the restrained concern of the soldiers, he did not yet understand what would happen. And no soldier saw fit to educate him.

-

Eventually, the train screeched to a halt, collapsing against the rails as the magnetic charge was depleted. The lights went out. The screams that echoed through the ventilation system were much more insistent this time. Horrible recognition dawned, and Shinji almost screamed himself.

It was happening again. Shinji did not understand the feeling, just that it was true. Something awful was about to happen. Those screams, he had heard them before...

Without another thought, Shinji Ikari ran and locked himself in the small lavatory at the rear of the car.

-

The men might have grinned at the boy's flight, had they not been concerned with their firearms. In their line of work, they were cursed with incomplete knowledge, only what their superiors wanted them to know. So they had no clear idea what kind of threat to expect, only that it could be matched with sufficient force.

They taped flashlights to the wall to illuminate the heavily armored entry-hatch. They unlocked the tall cabinet towards the rear of the cabin and removed several automatic rifles. After checking their weaponry, the men waited.

-

In the lavatory, Shinji was shuddering terribly. His waking mind was showing him terrible things that he couldn't push away. He saw what was creeping towards the stalled train, even in the blackness of the tunnel. He could sense the insane mix of hunger and joy and something he could not name, building up in the tunnel outside.

Then he noticed that the thing in the tunnel was staring back at him. Again, he screamed.

-

As the boy began to scream, another, much more terrifying sound coming from the forward car. The people there joined Shinji's lament as the side of their car was torn away, and things came from the dark to claim them.

As screams turned into other, wet sounds, the private car was filled with the sound of safeties being clicked off. The darkness hid the men from one another, leaving them to sweat and shudder and quietly cry without fear of shame. They were soldiers, but also quite human, and they had been pushed far past their ordinary limits even before the train had slowed. To find themselves in such a fantastic situation was too much.

Silence. And then, a strange, melodious sound wafted through the air. It sounded vaguely like a flute, but some of the notes were strange, twisting and merging in odd ways. This further teased at the men's sanity, coaxing it over the edge.

And then the noise faded, but did not disappear. One of the men that still retained some composure moved to the ventilation grate and listened carefully. There was another sound over the strange music, a pulsing, creaking... and the fluting hadn't moved away, simply been diminished, as if...

A sudden back draft brought the smell of ruin. To the man at the ventilation duct, it smelled like a sun-bloated body, writhing with corruption, its stomach bloated with that deceptively smooth flesh that would split open at the slightest touch.

The soldier at the duct was suddenly back in the killing fields. Reaching to strip a side-arm from a half-naked corpse, and it's distended belly was erupting, and he was breathing it in, tasting it against his eyeballs and down his throat, felt it settle cold into the pit of his stomach...

He collapsed and vomited. Those near him tried to drag him clear, figuring he had finally cracked. They weren't expecting a gas attack, and indeed, that was the least of their worries. As one bent over the now-still form, something black began seeping through the grate. At first it seemed a trick of the uncertain flash-light, a mere shadow...

But then a gelatinous tentacle slowly extended from the shadow. It bobbed and swam through the air like a serpent, and for a moment the men watching it were transfixed.

It descended on the unaware agent, it's tip branching into three slender, searching growths. Then it took the agent, tendrils sliding into the base of his neck, lifting him off the ground, and throwing him across the room. The top of his skull and some gray matter remained in the thing's tri-fingered grasp.

All this happened in an second. When that instant passed, the men reacted.

-

When Shinji woke, the gunfire had faded. Looking in the small lavatory mirror, he scraped away the blood that had dribbled from his nose down his chin. Only then did he realize that the lights were back on, and the train was underway again.

They must have fixed the train, he realized. Fleeing to the lavatory, the thing outside, he must have been letting his mind get the better of him... something that hadn't happened in almost a year. Shinji cursed his own cowardice and opened the door.

There was a man. He was floating two feet off the ground. He appeared to be missing the top of his head.

Shinji closed the door.

Something black oozed in from the outside and ripped the door away.

The man was still there, flesh guant and drawn, most certainly dead. Something dark moved at the top of his head where his scalp should have been. He was not alone.

End Chapter One


	2. Fall

Fall

The First Shelter had been the largest on Earth. With more then twenty cubic miles of living space, it was a massive diagonal spike deep into the Earth's strata. Powered by a geothermal tap and several N2 power plants, the first of five Nipponese shelters was the envy of the world in it's time.

Shinji Ikari had lived in the First Shelter for most of his life. His father and mother had been important scientists, and warranted being among the first evacuated to the shelter. They lived and worked there for several years, until business had called them away. They had to go to America, and after Second Impact the skies and oceans were no longer safe… so they had soared through the heavens on wings of steel, as Shinji's aunt had been so fond of saying. One of the last orbital flights.

Not wanting to endanger their child by traveling by uncertain means, Shinji had been left in the care of his uncle. He was three. Shinji would not recall until much later in life how both his parents had silently cried as they kissed him and then slid away in their pressure suits. Shinji himself had cried and cried.

Several years after the First Shelter's establishment, plans were drafted to put a number of scavenged, defunct mag-lev trains into use. Around the world N2 mines were detonated in tight shafts of light tens of miles long. The resulting tunnels between shelters were reinforced with segmented concrete supports, and then put into service as the primary transportation system, conditions aboveground becoming having become even more undesirable.

The First Shelter was one of the last to create such a system.

Shinji had been there along with everyone else, a bored thirteen year old absently holding a Nipponese flag that had no real meaning to him. He waited on a field of Astroturf, halogen lights high above him. That is the one memory of that day that really stayed with him; being surrounded by plain artificiality, right before something brutal and unnatural came and tore it all away.

Seventy-five miles away, the charge was placed, carefully adjusted, triple-checked, and detonated. The result was an oblong tunnel 20 yards at its widest point, connecting the first shelter mankind had built to the rest of the world.

The First Shelter had been stocked to the brim with medical supplies. A bare minimum was left aboveground. The other Nipponese shelters had hardly any. They would have been using leeches if not for UN transferred specialists. This tunnel meant salvation for many people. Therefore, what followed the creation of the tunnel killed many people, directly and indirectly.

The other shelter was supposed to be sending a car down the tunnel after it had cooled. It should have taken two and a half hours for the car to arrive. It failed to appear. After three hours, people began to show concern. Then the demolitions team, who still had a seismograph set up, determined that the other end of the tunnel had been blown close with conventional explosives.

This relieved and confused people at the same time. It at least explained why the car hadn't come, but why blast the tunnel shut?

The tunnel was just below the park area, the main entrance a gaping hole in the center, accessible by stairwell. People lounged on the grass above it, beneath the hot halogens, waiting for news.

-

Domen Kurosawa had been a dentist before Second Impact. Now he was a fungal farmer, assistant seismologist, and general-purpose medic. He sat before rows of delicate equipment, monitoring the subtle vibrations of the earth resettling after the N2 blast. 'Boss' was down replacing the balancing mechanism in one of the thump pads, which had been damaged during the detonation.

"Hey Kurosawa!" Boss called up, "Adjust the range to minimal, I'm calibrating."

Domen flipped a switch, twisted a dial, and then tapped his earphones. Normal sounds of rock setting, corresponding with the readout.

But what was that…? A regular rhythmic beat in the rock, and the readout matched. Almost like a… heart-beat? Domen rubbed sleep from his eyes. He'd been on watch since the N2 blast, it was starting to screw with his head.

The motion in the rock continued, and then was joined by another sound, soft at first, but steadily growing. Checking the computer, Domen concluded from its weight and impact pattern that it was the car from the other shelter.

"Hey Boss! It's the car! It's about 100 yards out."

"I know that you idiot, you can hear it from here!"

Domen took off his earphones and felt very foolish. The tunnel reverberated with the hum of an approaching diesel engine. As he got off the seismology platform a JSSDF hummer erupted from the tunnel, going far too fast.

People jumped out of the way as the car slammed through lines of vehicles and equipment. Domen was still behind the seismology platform when the car slammed into the delicate sensing apparatus below it. Boss threw himself clear, and Domen tried to do the same, but the car still clipped his legs, spinning him around and slamming him into a support pole.

He laid where he had fallen, legs broken and bleeding. The rest of his life was spent watching a massacre begin.

The car slammed into the wall, buckled. But by some miracle, the gas tank did not rupture. SDF personal quickly descended on the car, ignoring the pained sounds Domen was making. Above him, the seismology platform, some supports and all of it's sensing equipment destroyed, began to lean…

One of the SDF men was calling for a crowbar, the door was jammed shut. The windows looked as though they had been painted black. Someone started slamming the window with his elbow. That was when the door exploded.

Domen thought for sure he was dreaming. The door was blown clear off its hinges, and a sticky black something shot after it. As the door fell to earth, the black thing began to dissipate like a mist. Men were running around senselessly, some drawing their weapons, some trying to spray the thing with fire extinguishers.

When the black mist and white foam cleared, a man was revealed. Standing next to the car, his skin pallid, uniform immaculate for the largely ceremonial function driving to the other end of the tunnel was supposed to be. That was the last thing Domen would remember clearly, sanely.

The man, a high ranking officer, judging by his uniform, grabbed a medic that hurried up to attend to him. There was an audible crack as that medic's windpipe was crushed, his neck snapped, and before anyone else could move, the pale soldier tore off the other's head.

Domen could only stare as the man stood up and started at the remaining soldiers SDF, black ooze dripping from his mouth. The SDF men warned the man… the _thing_, twice before opening fire.

The thing skreeched as it's body was torn apart in the gunfire. Domen was screaming too. He was a dentist. He had autopsied corpses before, in med school, but this was something on an entirely different level. He screamed until the mist began to rise from the broken door, and more ex-officers of the SDF climbed out, eyes black, hands wrenched into claws.

Domen screamed as those creatures were cut down in a rain of bullets. The red goo that erupted from their wounds was covering everything. It was on his face. It burned! Then someone tossed a grenade underneath the hummer. The resulting explosion catapulted the car into the air. Domen was still screaming, his eyes pinpoints, his mind long gone, when the car fell down on top of him.

His was one of the cleanest deaths.

-

They came in many forms. Almost immediately after the hummer went up in flames, those personal splattered with red residue turned their weapons on one another, insane smiles on their faces.

The lights failed as the geothermal tap petered out and the N2 generators overloaded and slagged. The large fans whose sole purpose was to re-circulate air ground to a halt.

And in the darkness, in the confusion, the enemy came in its true form. No longer constrained to Trojan horses or puppets, the Deep Ones surged out of the hole that had meant salvation for so many of the Nipponese. Slimy green flesh caught in the faint light of emergency torches made their eruption look like the flowering of a gangrenous wound. Along with them, across their bodies and backs, a terrible blackness flowed.

Born by many means, but with the same formless body, the Shoggoths roamed among the throngs of panicked humanity. A slight twitch of their massive, undulating bulk was enough to crushed a leg, a pelvis… nothing serious enough to kill, for the Shoggoths ate terror and pain as their more corporeal brothers ate human flesh. They surged under locked doors and erupted out of toilets and sinks. They stirred their sticky fingers through living human brain, and grawffed their terrible laughter as the bodies twitched and made small mewing noises.

-

In the train, between the shelters, Shinji remembers these things and doesn't. His mind has been irreparably scarred, and he finds himself recalling some of the events with terrifying clarity as a man's corpse collapses in front of him, and the tentacle of a shoggoth reaches out to claim him. Just like before.

Just like before.

Shinji doesn't remember how he escaped the First Shelter. He had simply slipped into being one day. Found himself wandering the lower workings of the shelter from which the excavation N2 blast had come. After three days of hard interrogation he was put on standard work detail, his appearance marked up as divine intervention.

He had been put to work making sushi in a refactory. He had gotten pretty damn good at it too. His life at the new shelter hadn't been all that bad, but for the dreams that haunted him. When awake he couldn't really acknowledge the sense of lose he had for his uncle and aunt, for what had been his world for so long. When asleep every shadow threatened to tear him apart, and that symphony of screams and pain and strange, animal lust filled his mind.

But even so, Shinji Ikari slept with the lights off.

He charged the monster.


	3. Impressions

Impressions

Shinji's mag-lev train never arrived in Station. It would take weeks of careful manipulation to cover up its disappearance, and the disappearance of those fifty-nine people aboard it, but it would be done.

Far better that the train be swallowed up in a secret by-lane before arriving. The things still aboard it would have delighted in slaughtering everyone on the loading docks, running amok for hours before at last being gunned down. They had come by certain means that Shinji now denied them. The shoggoth that had flowed in the darkness with such speed had returned to the void, its body pumped full of white phosphorus that smoldered in its collapsed, bag-like corpse.

The Deep Ones now barked at each other and ate at the human corpses in the first two segments. In their limited, bestial understanding, they knew that the train would eventually reach a destination, one where there was more food.

In fact, when the train did stop, it arrived at the Under Station, a secret NERV staging area that, among other things, had excellent containment facilities.

When the train halted, the guns started speaking. Shinji decided it best to stay where he was. When the door to segment four was cut open and a man wearing a complicated mask emerged from the dust and gun-smoke, the young man simply let his gun fall from limp fingers, and bracingly rose.

"Are you Shinji Ikari?" The man spoke in rehearsed Nipponese.

Shinji nodded.

-

The Under Station was immense, easily a fourth as large as some of the smaller shelters. The man that had addressed Shinji earlier was steering him by shoulder away from the other three train segments, where maimed bacchanalian (that's frog-like) creatures were being caged. At the sight of that, Shinji stopped. More memories of the fall of the First Shelter flooded his mind. These creatures, they had sung and danced and played their arcane instruments in celebration. Here they were scattered across the cold metal landing, bleeding and incomplete.

Shinji shrugged off the man's guiding hand and, before anyone could stop him, was on top of one of the so-called Deep Ones, smashing its clawed hands beneath his heels, breaking its jagged maw apart with a club he suddenly found in his hand. The frog-thing screamed a toneless note that was really more of a bark, and was silenced as Shinji's doughy human hands slammed into and ruptured both of its eyes.

The creature, crippled from the waist down before this attack, slumped down against the floor, clearly dead. Shinji let the club drop to the ground and turned, not wanting to see the other living Deep Ones, not wanting to feel that dark temptation again.

"Where is my father?" He asked.

-

Misato Katsuragi was not having a good day. The Second Child not making landfall on schedule, and now this mess with the Third. Things were not coming together nicely - could the Enemy be aware of NERV's plans?

The Lieutenant surveyed the scene from a balcony overlooking the Under Station, and saw that, at least here, all was good. It filled her with glowing satisfaction to see them crippled and broken. She wished it were her place to suggest the tortures that were called "psychological tests" on paper, which these loathsome sub-human shits would be subjected to.

A man in containment gear approached and saluted. "Preliminary de-contamination procedure completed. Request permission to attempt evacuation of Third Child?" Misato nodded, and returned the salute. Many people here were honestly happy to see the Children. They knew how important they were, what their role in the future would hopefully be. Amongst the scene of slaughter, with the hope for tomorrow filling her, Misato almost teared up. Almost. It was still a real shitty day.

On the platform the soldier that had addressed her was opening the last segment. Damage to it appeared superficial. They had found that corpse of a shoggoth in the luggage segment, beneath the ventilation duct that connected to the last segment. It was altogether reasonable that everyone in the fourth segment had fought the star-spawn off without incident.

A boy emerged from the last segment, apparently oblivious to the soldier that had come to retrieve him. His white button up shirt was splashed with blood, his pants likewise darkened. The details of his face were indiscernible from Misato's position. The soldier was guiding him… and then the young man grabbed the soldier's tazer-prod and full-body tackled a Deep One.

Every goddamn person in the room stopped what they were doing, except those trying to persuade the monsters into cages. Even the ever-present hum of the air circulation system seemed muted as the young man beat the monster, the wet thump of fists and that bone to metal crunch filling the spacious area. The young man was oddly quiet the whole time, in contrast to the creature, that was making all kinds of wet sounds.

The young man finished it, and killed the Deep One with his bare hands. He stood and turned, palm to arm blackened with gore, and asked the soldier a quiet question.

In addition to her duties as Lieutenant of NERV, Katsuragi was the primary liaison to the Children, knowing Nipponese, Teutonic and English. The language barrier was yet another problem they faced in the salvation of mankind. Honestly, she had been expecting children, people that needed protecting. But after watching the Third Child systematically destroy a creature more then capable of killing a full-grown man, all Misato could think was "Hardcore!"

The young man was pointed in her direction, and suddenly everything she had planned to say to him seemed small and condescending. Better to keep it short and get him to the Commander soon. Then she could ponder how to handle him.

Where is my father? The boy asked her in Nipponese.

He seemed tense and on the verge of exploding, but not with rage or anger. Something else lurked beneath his gray eyes, and suddenly Misato realized what he was asking for. Putting an arm around him, cautious of acting too motherly, she led him towards the sterilization area.

Misato thought she had seen a glimmer of tears in Shinji's eyes when he had spoken to her. Perhaps he was really still a child after all. At the sterile baths, she slowly instructed him on procedure, and then sent him through. Three minutes later she followed, stripping off all her clothes, dumping them in a blind slot, and then getting hit with a high-pressure spray from every direction at once. Business as usual.

Redressing in clothes that smelled heavily of alcohol, she found Shinji waiting for her in the hallway. Much pinker then he had been, now clothed in an engineer's jumpsuit, the young man looked much more alive, but still distinctly off. It was then that Misato noticed his hair, matted wet against his skull, had streaks of white running through it.

-

After the shower Shinji felt much cleaner. Almost refreshed. The jumpsuit fit him well, and he didn't smell like blood anymore. The focus of hate and rage had dissipated, the memories of the First Shelter receeding to some dark corner of his mind. He felt human again. He still wanted very much to see his father, but there were other things, at last.

This shelter, the little of it he had seen, was constructed oddly. Space was in no way economized, nor material. The hallway in which he stood could have easily handled three people abreast; the shelter he had been living in for the last three years could handle only one. From the train dock to the bath, he had covered enough ground to quarter three thousand people easily.

And he had never heard of the Arkham Shelter before the soldiers had come for him. Perhaps it was newly constructed.

His thoughts turned to the young Nipponese woman that had tried to comfort him. She was quite attractive. Seemed friendly. She had treated him like a child, but perhaps for a moment he had been. Shinji had just wanted to get away from those things, and she had provided him an escape. Doubtless she was the Misato Katsuragi mentioned in his short briefing.

He suddenly wondered at her in the shower, disrobed. Then the shadows edged into his mind, and the screams, and he turned his inner eye to more mundane things.

Shinji had just come as close to circumnavigating the globe as anyone in the last thirteen years. From Japan to China, beneath the barren expanse of what the soldier's called "the Middle East," to Spain and Britain, and finally New York. It seemed like an awful lot of resource and expense for just him.

His father had never contacted him after the Fall of the First Shelter. When mother had died, the man had sent a telegram and nothing else. It took Shinji a while to sort out his emotions towards his father, but the Fall had simplified things. If his father took issue with communicating, fine. But this couldn't be a way of apology. Shinji doubted his father had any desire to see him, and could understand why, in a limited way.

These days people could be executed by squandering resources. Only if his father were god himself would he be able to send his son from one edge of human civilization to the other simply to see him. And from what Shinji understood Gendou Ikari was a very important man, but he was not god.

-

As Misato led Shinji to the trans-rail system, she haltingly asked him about the train ride. Was he okay? Did he need to talk to someone about it? The response was quite dark.

It was nothing I have not experienced before.

"You know what those things were?" She asked. "Your psychological report said you were amnesiac after the... the First Shelter incident."

That was true. But not anymore. I remember... a lot now. And at the last, Shinji's voice dropped an octave and seemed to grate, his non-specific answer petering out, like he just couldn't summon the will to talk about it further.

"The men in your car, how did they die?" A soft question with no good answer.

The black thing the… "Shoggoth", he had trouble with the word, but said it carefully, correctly. It came through the wall. The men did not use fire against it. When they were all dead I took a weapon and killed it myself.

And Misato stopped. Turned. "You killed a shoggoth," she lapsed into English. Repeated it in Nipponese.

The boy just nodded, damnably dismissive.

They dislike fire.

Misato's pocket chirruped. She took her eyes off Shinji and removed the phone. "Yes?"

"The Commander has been called into conference, Lieutenant." It was Ritsu, all business during business hours.

"I have his son right here. I'll take him to the bridge until the Commander can meet with him, okay?" Bad timing for a conference, Ikari.

Ritsuko was talking with someone else, then: "Fine. I'm sure the operators can keep him occupied. Try to get him to eat something though, the report I'm reading on the train isn't good. What is his condition?"

All sorts of fucked up, par for the course, Misato thought, but for simplicity's sake replied: "Seems fine. Okay, I'll be up in thirty." Snapping the slim phone shut, she turned to her charge.

"Hungry?"


	4. Incursion

Incursion

Off the coast of New York, a fierce battle was being waged. Two titanic monsters clashed together beneath the waves with slow but insane force. One fought with the driven determination of a human, the other with a certain alien detachment, its will not its own. The sound of their struggle carries through the water around the world, and through this darker things observe them.

For a while the battle is even. But as the first tense seconds of confrontation turn into hours, the human began to get sloppy. Eventually a follow-through was executed that should have been pulled, and the human was pinned against the sea floor.

The alien victor is motionless for a long while. It had accomplished its task, it would now wait for further instruction. There had been a time, long ago, when the behemoth had been of its own mind, wild and free. It had danced in the currents and dwelt in the fallen cities that dotted the Pacific. But then its master, a being that had been old when the Sun was young, had arisen from the deepest parts of the ocean, and the great titan was now little more then a pawn.

From the north came the sound of flutes.

The creature wrapped its many arms around the fallen foe, and then, an action that defied all physical law. It threw…

Shinji was enjoying a cup ramen, sealed air-tight well before Second-Impact, on the bridge. He was sitting in a chair normally reserved for the Lieutenant, who was at the moment harassing an operator. Central Dogma, as Lt. Katsuragi had called it, was fairly quiet for a nerve center (not a pun). Shinji absorbed that peace, and it made the noodles all the better.

Then everything went to hell.

It started right in front of him. A rapid beeping from an operator's computer. The young woman, who had been totally absorbed in a paperback novel, dropped the book and started slamming the keyboard with her hands. Or typing. All Shinji could see was her back.

Then the lights turned red, and the most wonderfully ear-splitting klaxon sounded.

That was how Asuka Langley Sohryu, late of Germany, the ocean, and most recently the sky, came to Arkham Shelter. The crimson humanoid hit as a blur, directly over the hidden base, but with much less force then should have been possible. It landed cheek and shoulder to the ground and rolled half a mile before at last coming to rest. Aside from an impressive impact crater, at the bottom of which the shelter's armor gleamed, the damage done by this extraordinary event was minor. Except, of course, to the ballistic.

"Segments thirteen, twenty four, and five are broken!" Maya was screaming.

"AT Field deployed at the last second, the Magi are reporting an 85 percent difference between real and projected damage…" Another voice.

"Get the pilot on comm.!" Misato was shouting.

"We can't! It's a newer protocol," came the response.

Shinji absorbed all this while throwing away his half-finished cup Ramen and walking to the side of the Bridge.

Something like two dozen people were working at computer terminals below, running from one location to another, speaking calmly or screaming into headsets. All Shinji could do was watch, and even then he still had no clear idea of what was going on. A botched space flight, maybe? What else could hit that hard and have people inside to communicate with? From the bridge it had felt like an N2 mine going off, a sensation Shinji was reasonably accustomed to. Though he thought they had discontinued the space program years ago.

"I'll take it from here, Lieutenant," came a hard female voice behind him.

A blonde woman strode onto the platform. About the same age as Katsuragi, slightly taller, a beauty mark that might have been fake…

"Ritsuko, it's the Second Child, she…" Misato tapped Maya, who began a technical explanation.

"Take him down to the launch bay." Ritsuko said, gesturing to Shinji. "I'm better equipped to handle this."

Shooting the other woman a hurt (or angry?) look, the Lieutenant hurried Shinji off the bridge.

"What is happening?" Shinji asked, voice filled with more worry then he would have liked.

"There are…" Misato stopped at a pair of sealed doors, tapped a code into the inlaid keypad, and led him through. "This complex is under the jurisdiction of NERV, a organization backed by the UN."

She led him into a small elevator, and punched the lowest key. "Our purpose is to counteract the instigators of the Incident… Second Impact, and return Earth to its original state." The elevator slowed, the door opened, Misato led him out.

"Our mainstay is the artificial humanoid armored unit, the Evangelion. Three currently exist, one of which just hit us after being catapulted a great distance by an unknown force." She paused at an intersection and took out a much-creased map. "Like a goddamn labyrinth…" she muttered in English.

Deciding on a path, she continued. "You were transported here because you are a candidate to pilot one of these units. Very few people have the ability to synchronize with an Eva, and unfortunately those that do were all born after Second Impact."

That took a moment to sink in. "Wait… there's someone my age up there? Why…"

Misato stopped and cut him off. "We don't have time for questions right now. I'll gladly answer any you might have, but after this is over."

The "after this is over" made Shinji's stomach turn.

They finally found their way to the launch bay, a massive cavern, completely dark. The walkway was outlined in luminous tape. Lt. Katsuragi led him some distance, then a snap and beep and she was talking into her cell phone again.

"Divert power to holding bay 01." The young woman ordered.

The lights came on.

Shinji screamed.

His first impression was that of a great purple grinning skull, and his reaction was fairly characteristic. The Evangelion, even submerged to its chin, was a fairly awesome sight. Though officially this chamber was kept unlit for reasons of energy economy, it was really because the engineers that had built it would come in after hours or on their breaks to stare at it. After a while, that sort of thing got creepy.

The head was oddly flat, contrasted by a horn that erupted from the bridge of the nose. Great empty eye sockets stared out, armored teeth were outlined in red, and a fin thrust out on either side and around the back of the head.

"That is an Evangelion?" The boy asked, nearly stammering. "Why does it look so sinister?"

"Because that is the way they are described in the Scrolls." Came a voice far overhead.

Shinji turned.

Faced his father.

The specifics were impossible to discern, given the distance, the Commander being in a control room far overhead, but there was a commonality in feature and expression between estranged father and son that was shocking to observe. Misato felt herself stepping back…

The young man was shocked into silence, not so much finally meeting a father he barely remembered, but the sudden rush of emotion that accompanied it. Through his awful memories of the First Shelter, through his endless rationalizations to account for his father's actions…

The man was here now, and Shinji would have answers.

"What happened to my mother!?"

-

There was a pregnant pause as the commander looked down at his son, standing in front of the Evangelion. For a long moment Gendou expected his son to break down, to apologize. That moment passed.

Gendou Ikari did not love anything. There were things he enjoyed doing, but Yui had truly ruined him for all others. His son didn't know it, but he was now a front line soldier in a war that had waged for almost two decades, even before the Second Impact. Reports from Shelter Four, from whence Shinji had come, had painted the image of a weak, callow young man. Perhaps the train incident had brought about a kind of resolution within the boy.

Gendou Ikari did not love Shinji. What he felt was surprise and perhaps a little pride. These emotions were quickly shunted away, as they always were, and the commander of NERV pushed his son's question aside. Time was a factor.

-

His father didn't even acknowledge him. "Lieutenant Katsuragi, we have an incursion originating from the maritime sector. The Magi place its ETA at thirty minutes. Please contact Dr. Akagi and advise her on the tactical deployment of our forces."

"What condition is the Second Child in?" the young woman asked.

"Irrelevant," came the cold reply. "Eva Unit Two is no longer operational. The S2 Engine has been damaged beyond the limits of self-regeneration."

At this, the lieutenant opened her phone and started speaking rapidly.

Finally, the commander addressed his son directly. "You will deploy in Unit One, the thing before you. You will either salvage the remains of Unit Two or engage its antagonist."

The young man looked at the massive head behind him, and then at his father. "I don't know anything about this!" he yelled. "I can't even drive a car!"

"You will be instructed." The older man said.

"Don't I get a say in any of this? You want me to go aboveground…" at this Shinji's finger stabbed straight up, "and fight some…" and then he was cut off.

Men with guns had materialized on either side of Gendou. Guns that were pointed at the reluctant pilot.

"You don't have a choice!" The deep voice echoed through the room and almost knocked Shinji off his feet. "Under Article Sixteen of the Emergency Human Rights Act, those people squandering governmental assets will be confined in isolation or executed. If you disobey this order the men and material that were expended to transport you were wasted."

As one, the armed men cocked their weapons.

"Commander, he's just a boy!" Katsuragi was suddenly in front of him, putting herself between Shinji and his father. "He's just… its too much to ask anyone to take all this in so quickly!"

Shinji tried to push past her. "You bastard!" he screamed. "I was forced to come here! I didn't even know what was..."

He was out cold before the gun reports were heard. Six small darts stitched the middle of his chest, up to his shoulder. One had struck Misato's arm, and she angrily yanked it out while supporting Shinji.

"He's no good to us drugged!" she yelled, but kept her tone even.

Even at a distance, Misato knew the commander was smiling.

-

The Lieutenant sat across from him in the train carriage, skin made orange in the evening star. Shinji yawned and stood.

"How much further?" he asked conversationally, looking at the Nipponese hillside as it rolled past.

"It all depends on choice, Shinji." The young woman replied.

The boy looked back at her, and grinned. "What do you mean? This is a train, it has a departure, and a destination. It doesn't stop anywhere. There is no choice here."

"This is not a true image. This image has been crafted by another…" Misato stood, and suddenly she wasn't wearing any clothes. "They are trying to distract you, to make you complacent."

Shinji wasn't looking at the young, beautiful woman's face anymore. As he took in her wonderful curves, her voice began to fade… and then she walked over, grabbed his face and brought it level with hers. "This train runs parallel to the light and dark. For now, it goes towards neither. It is your will, and that alone that can guide you. Wake up. WAKE UP!"

And Shinji surged back to consciousness.

Two things clicked at the same time. One, he was aboveground. Two, he was drowning. Flailing violently, pressing against the ceiling of his confinement, he beat his fists against the unyielding metal and screamed with his burning lungs. In front of him was a vista of devastation, the brown plain of the Earth. As his vision dimmed and his contortions grew spastic, that image, that place, became vivid to him.

There were the dead trees, stripped of everything save their bleached trunks. They looked like gravestones. There was a gentle dip in the earth where a river had once flowed. The Earth was all rocks and dirt and death. Nothing grew here anymore. And far in the distance, a mountain moved towards him. It spoke to him, and he could just barely hear its voice over the song of the dusty winds.

It wanted him to breath. And he did.

LCL flooded his bleeding lungs, and Shinji was pulled back from the abyss.

Stars danced in his vision, and the roaring of the 'wind' receded. The voice was still there. In a half-thinking delirium, Shinji recognized it as belonging to the blond who had supplanted Katsuragi on the bridge.

"…should have put him in a plug suit Sir!" she was saying.

"Hello?" The boy croaked out, his throat suddenly burning.

He was really there. The last of the fog lifted from Shinji's head and he took in the view he knew was real. He was aboveground. A shock went through him at that, and he froze.

"Shinji, this is Dr. Akagi, we met earlier on the Bridge. You are in the entry plug of Unit One." Why was she being so calm? She had sent him aboveground! He was going to die!

"…underground. Put me back under the ground!" the boy yelled, looked about and yanking at a handle…

…that turned out to be a control. The view started to turn to the left. Shinji snatched his hand away as though the handle were hot.

"You work for NERV now," the woman was patiently explaining. "Our objectives are now yours. You will not be allowed to return to the Geo-Front until you complete your mission."

For a moment Shinji was ready to deflate, but surprising strength flowed through him, and instead he got angry.

"What is my mission, then?" he said, relishing the sharp way the words rolled off his tongue. He had no intention of letting them enjoy this.

"Immediately ahead of you is the target. You are to destroy it by any means necessary. If you'll press the top right button in your left control yolk, the Eva will deploy its progressive knife."

Shinji gripped the handle, the yolk, again, and did as instructed. The view tilted as a giant hand came into and out of few, grabbing something at what must have been shoulder height. When it withdraw it held a massive knife that glowed a dull red.

"Good, good," the voice was murmuring. "You weren't awake when the Eva was activated, so we need to run you through the synchronization sequence again. I'm rebooting the OS now…"

The entry plug went dark. The last view of that tall moving something had been very close.

Then… light! A million colors that were somehow all shades of white assaulted Shinji's vision. He felt something within him beginning to unfurl, and then it was like he was falling forwards…

The screen reactivated. Suddenly the entry plug was no longer amber-colored, but bathed in white light. Shinji could no longer 'see' the LCL. The monster loomed huge on the view screen, and it was all Shinji could do not to take. A step. Back.

The Evangelion took one step backwards.

In Central Dogma everyone on the bridge stared at the screen, the sole exception being Ritsuko. Her eyes were locked on the synchronization readout.

It read 89.4. Easily thirty percent beyond their best expectations.

Then the ratio dropped to 71.

On the massive holographic display, the Eva started to lose its balance.

Shinji didn't automatically connect his thought with the Eva's action. He panicked.

-

Something was very wrong. Suddenly the darkness was eating away at him again. His terrible memories came bubbling to the surface. He slipped in and out of vital knowledge. He forgot how to walk. How do I breath?

The shoggoths of his mind were trying to get out. The specters of terror wanted to go home! They were born of the seed of the Old Ones, hunted by those Whom Dwelt on Forbidden Leng!

The living shadows were the foot soldiers of that great and terrible army. Ones sired in the frozen wastes, in the darkest trenches of the ocean, in primeval wooded thickets, in the dank pits of Ancient Yuggoth!

-

"His Eco-Border is fragmenting!"

"Sync ratio can no longer be determined!"

"The AT Field is folding in on itself, the Eva is defenseless!"

-

He was back on the old-fashioned train again. The girl with the wispy white hair was there, and so was Lt. Katsuragi.

"I'm scared," the girl was saying. "I want to go home. Let me out, Shinji."

"Don't." Misato said. "She is your darkest memory. Don't let her rule you. Pain can only breed more pain."

"Where is your home?" Shinji asked the girl softly.

-

Central Dogma was filled with the sounds of chanting. Through the audio feed from Unit One's entry plug came a deep, guttural sound.

" Iae Iae Cthulhu Fthagn!" the voice barked. "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fthagn."

The voice repeated itself over and over and over…

Ritsuko cut the audio feed.

-

Outside, the great and terrible thing that had so soundly defeated Unit Two came to a stop. It had heard something on the winds, something familiar. It was confused.

"I come from many places," the thing that looked like a young girl said. "But for millennia while all others were silent, one being spawned me, fed me, shielded my from the light while I grew strong."

"She's evil, don't you see? She IS the darkness, not something merely borne…" Shinji silenced the image of Misato with a hand. He rose and moved to stand in front of the girl with hair like snow.

"What is the name of this one thing?" He asked her softly, lovingly.

The girl looked up at him with those great blood-red eyes, a smile creeping onto her face, making her all the more lovely. "His name…" she began…

"…is Dagon."

-

Shinji's eyes snapped open, and alien words died on his lips.

In Central Dogma, the tall green mountain surged onto the Evangelion.

"We've failed," Ritsuko murmured.

And suddenly the enemy was flying away, propelled by some unseen force. The freed Eva swayed in the fierce winds, but did not topple.

The sync ratio jumped to 150

-

Will was done faster then thought. The Evangelion leapt through the air, higher then its muscles could possibly propel, and landed on the Other. A red blade flashed out, a fist smashed. A mouth opened and teeth tore into green, rubbery flesh.

In the entry plug Shinji sat motionless. His mind was totally consumed with purpose.

Ropey fragments of the beast flew up and were caught in the winds. The dull, wet slap of armored fist on flesh turned hollow as the flesh and earth gave way to the armor plating of the Geo-Front. The Other screamed with its dozen mouths as organs ruptured. Its brain turned to sludge; its throat and faces were bitten off and consumed. Tentacles feebly wrapped around the marauding Eva, but quickly fell away, shredded.

The girl was on her feet. "Stop!" she was screaming.

Shinji turned in his seat. "It is the father of the Deep Ones," he said tonelessly. "Those things that killed my aunt and uncle. I'll kill it if I can. Along with you."

Everyone in Central Dogma was silent. The scattered audio of the battlefield echoed through the room. Ritsuko was listening to the entry plug feed through an earpiece. She heard what Shinji said.

When Shinji had turned to address the girl, the Eva had done likewise, a startlingly human gesture among an orgy of bestial violence. Suddenly the room was thick with unease and anticipation. What exactly had they unleashed?

When at last the Enemy was either painted in the dirt or spread to the savage winds, the Evangelion stopped. It stood. It _roared_.

On the train the girl's screams turned savage and inhuman. She launched herself at Shinji, but was repelled back, clothes and flesh shredded.

"That won't work." Shinji found himself saying. "Your father is dead. Just _die_!" he screamed the last.

The girl vanished.

The pilot of Unit One sank into the arms of the other occupant of the train, the thing with Lt. Katsuragi's face. And for the first time in many years, his dreams were not memories.


	5. Healing

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Healing

Three days after Unit Two's spectacular arrival and Unit One's victory, both pilots were still incapacitated.

The young girl, Asuka, was slipping in and out of a coma. Her injuries were superficial, but had been complicated by malnutrition. The doctors anticipated that she would be fully conscious given another day, and be able to walk in three.

Shinji languished in a holding cell masquerading as a hospital bed. He spent most of his time watching pre-Impact American sitcoms he couldn't understand, and trying to not go insane.

-

NERV and its commander could not afford to dismiss or demerit Lt. Katsuragi, despite her questionable actions in defense of the Third Child prior to Unit One's launch. They were, however, still perfectly capable of punishing her.

An official UN report had to be filed, and the members of the UN Relations Board were, unfortunately for Lt. Katsuragi, all enjoying some unexpected excused vacation. In their absence, responsibility for the report fell to her.

The UN and NERV took careful note of one another. Neither claimed authority over the other. The UN was a largely administrative body that handled the day-to-day survival of humanity. NERV sought to undo the devastation of Second Impact.

The UN kept people fed. NERV brought the fight to the Enemy.

The mandate of neither organization infringed upon the other. But still, there were politics to deal with. Procedures that must be observed. The official report the Lieutenant would be preparing was the requirement of one of the numerous treaties between the two organizations.

The challenge Misato faced was the nudge and wink that accompanied all reports to the UN concerning the Enemy. Trying to cite the _Cthaat Aquadingen _or _Necronomicon_ was problematic. Tended to make the low-level functionaries at the UN curious.

So UNKNOWNs dotted the report like tears. The rest of it was straight prose fiction. If Misato had any predication to writing, she might have not been so miserable.

Then again? Producing sixty pages of small-print that conformed to a complex style-sheet? Not a good time for a single person. That was why a committee of seven usually dealt with it.

It had taken her two solid days of work, but the Lieutenant finally had a working draft – which she had no intention whatsoever of revising. She had been instructed to give the finished report to Dr. Akagi, who would upload it to the UN mainframe whenever the next communication window was. Misato knew that if she handed the report to Ritsuko in person, the doctor would look at it, point out four things wrong with the cover sheet, and have her "Do it again."

So Misato had security move the bi-monthly fire drill of the Technology Center where Ritsuko worked to coincide with her delivery. Waited until the doctor had filed out of the building with the rest of the techs and used her ID on the back entrance. Ran up two flights of stairs, slapped the report down on Akagi's desk, and was gone before the techs re-entered the building.

-

Feeling quite happy with herself after that, Katsuragi walked across the verdant green of the Middle Sector, which was a fairly accurate model of The Way Things Had Been. Trees, grass, and all manner of plants flourished under a massive, unified light source. The black pyramid that housed the management offices and the adjacent pool, right in the center of it all, framed the area with a mystical quality.

The wind that wafted across the park and waved through the grass was rich with smells. Not a bit of the acrid sterility that pervaded the rest of the shelter was present here. Just sunlight the way she remembered it, a solid stopgap against the nihilism that comes with living in a world you intellectually understand is dying. If not for the Middle Sector, Misato was quite certain everyone would have gone stir-crazy long ago.

She thought it best to absorb it now. The smell, the light, the living atmosphere. Where she was going next would have none of those.

-

Most of the hospital had been shut down early on to economize men and material. When you live underground, in a world of highly developed safety regulations? Turns out it is astonishingly difficult to injure yourself accidentally. After an initial wave of shared illness following Arkham shelter's establishment, everyone without an immunodeficiency just didn't get sick.

Pregnancies were extremely rare. People didn't talk about it.

The medical staff all worked other jobs. When their skills were not required, the doctors and nurses and orderlies were cooks and programmers and janitors. Protocol placed at least one attending staff member at the hospital at all times, a position that was awarded monthly, by lottery. Most of the time that meant someone got a month's vacation.

Two months back there had been a case of appendicitis. That had been pretty exciting, the first real medical emergency in nearly two years, since that civilian overdosed on an exotic combination of stimulants on a train en-route from the New York shelter and decided everyone else was from some place called "Yuggoth." Started smashing furniture and trying to slice the other passengers with the pieces. By the time the train arrived at-Station the guy had been beaten to death. Body got taken to the hospital, frozen in the morgue, and promptly ignored by the on-staff doctor until someone got around to sending him an autopsy request.

A few days later the dead guy woke up. Smashed his way out of the morgue and killed the doctor in a terrible way. Shelter biometrics picked up the doctor's death and alerted security, which proceeded to shoot, burn, dismember, and finally bury the dead guy in a block of cement. Bits of him were still moving as they were thrown into the cement.

That was the story, anyway.

-

The last three days had been very busy for the hospital. The entire medical staff had been reactivated. Intense sessions with the Second Child were capped before and after with lots of heavy drinking, as the doctors tried to recall things they had learned back in medical school. There was extensive medical documentation and software for analyzing and recommending treatment, part of a standard UN package, but the hospital's mainframe had been carted off after the hospital was diminished, and no one seemed to know where it was. It was rather troubling, to not have any verified medical knowledge available. Word had it some clerks in storage, the morons who had supposedly signed for the missing medical mainframe, were enjoying confinement in Terminal Dogma while Intelligence staff went over nine miles of storage containers by hand.

If the Second Child's injuries had been even a little more serious, those clerks from storage would have simply disappeared.

Despite the superficial nature of her injuries, there was something _off_ about the Second Child. Something the doctors could sense only through an atrophied intuition. Vitals were all within human limits, but the girl had a sort of strength normally reserved for adrenaline spikes. The quantity of sedative they had to use to subdue her was just unreal. And then there was her attitude...

-

The Third Child's lunch was waiting for Lt. Katsuragi at the nurse station. The older black woman behind the desk spared Misato a glance and tapped the food tray twice with her pen before returning to a daily puzzle sheet. After signing a visitor's registry, Misato scooped up the tray and went to the pilot's room.

Shinji was dozing when she flashed her ID at the guards. The clatter of the tray on his bedside table woke him.

"Oh, hello Lieutenant," the boy greeted. "How are you?"

This politeness wasn't exactly forced, but there was still distrust in Shinji's eyes. Misato supposed he blamed her in part for his ordeal… blame she probably deserved. He had closed up, and was most of the time simply reactive to her. He didn't start conversation or lead it. Aside from simple answers to her queries, the boy expressed no specific interest in anything, aside from the condition of the pilot of Unit Two. He had asked Misato that question only once, and seemed satisfied after hearing that the other pilot would be all right.

"You're getting out of here," Misato replied conversationally. She watched Shinji carefully. He didn't have any reaction but "Oh."

Slightly disappointed, Misato went to the closet, withdrew a sealed package, and threw it onto the bed. One standard NERV uniform.

"All you have to do," Misato began, and noticed a very definite tic in Shinji's eye. Of course he knew what was coming. "is to agree to work with us."

The boy's gray eyes lowered and looked somewhere to her right. "I don't have a choice," he muttered. "If I don't agree, you'll just drug me and dump me in that thing again."

That clicked. He didn't remember being shot, one minute she had been behind him, and the next… he thought she had knocked him out.

Misato was torn between explaining what had happened to him, and her frustration with the way he was acting. He was… whining. That child she had glimpsed at in the Under Station had come out, and it was making Misato mad, but at the same time she couldn't blame him…

An idea came to her.

"Get up. Now."

The boy, startled, got out of the bed.

"Follow me. I want you to meet her."

And of course he knew who _she_ was. Sparing the guards outside the room an On-My-Authority, Misato led her charge, who she was trying very hard not to think of as a petulant child, to the intensive care unit.

-

While the Second Child was relatively stable, the doctors were cautious about moving her. Minor cranial trauma aside, the girl had made it clear that she didn't like being touched. She had regained consciousness when a nurse had been readying to shave off her hair. One broken electric razor and a screaming, blubbering nurse later, the girl still had her shoulder-length auburn. During a cursory inspection of the girl's breasts, the female mammographist had been assaulted. Ended up with a major concussion.

The first attempt to move the fierce red-head had ended in a way no one seemed to want to talk about.

So the Second Child was still in the intensive care unit, despite being in a relatively stable condition. Privacy screens had been erected. Specific parts of her body were assumed perfectly healthy and not touched.

She was quite a charmer.

-

The black nurse spared them a glance as they went by. Misato led the Third Child across the cold lobby. Through the double-hinged doors that led into the other wards. Down a long hallway where the clack of her shoes suddenly seemed to ring too loud.

A hospital wasn't the sort of place where you should be able to hear stuff like that, the echoing of footfalls. There was supposed to be the hum of machinery, intercom chatter. And people.

Lt. Katsuragi shuddered. The Middle Sector was an abstract comfort. This empty hallway was a terror.

They finally arrived at the ICU, where a thin, sweating man was waiting for them. Misato half-expected him to try and stop them, but instead the man only nodded, smiling at them both, and turned on his heel without a word. They followed him into another room that was lined with glass cubicles, one of which was shielded from view by a drawn U-track curtain. Several privacy screens had been erected as well.

"There she is," the man murmured. "Don't touch her," he addressed Shinji with an uncertain grin. "She bites."

As the man left, Misato noticed his hands were bandaged.

-

In addition to the thin hospital gown, a large black comforter was draped across the girl's middle. Misato silently thanked whoever had put it there. The gown had really left little to the imagination, and she hadn't brought Shinji here for that.

The boy was almost hiding behind her. The Lieutenant shifted to one side and gently pushed him forward... and the Third Child stiffened up at her touch. Biting a lip, from curse or apology she didn't know, Misato stood back, and waited.

Shinji approached the other youth hesitantly. Though drawn and pale, the pilot of Unit Two retained a certain fierceness about her. Even unconscious her body carried itself with a certain implicit warning, fingers grasping but not yet claws; knees slightly bent, primed for motion; a face that looked intense even in sleep.

"This is Asuka Langley Sohryu," Misato said to Shinji. "She's like you. She never had a choice. But she chose embraced her task, her _destiny_, rather then run from it."

The Lieutenant immediately regretted her choice of words, but at "destiny" Shinji gave a small start.

"This is the Second Child," she gestured to the sleeping pilot. "When you agree to work for us, you, Shinji Ikari, will become the Third."

Face solemn, he turned to her. "You're trying to make me feel bad for wanting to running away, I know." He limply gestured to Asuka. "But she is hurt and I am not," he seemed to be having trouble speaking..."And I shouldn't feel bad, but I do… why, is that?"

Shinji's voice actually broke there at the end. He looked away. Misato saw the tears drip off his chin anyway.

"This isn't f-fair…" he began, and then stopped. He wiped his face, very much the schoolboy… and then met Misato's somewhat pitying gaze.

"So I'll do it." He said, the softness in his eyes bleeding away. "I want to leave now."

-

After changing into the ill-fitting NERV uniform, the young Ikari hunched over the bedside table and carefully signed his name in Nipponese on the forms he was given. Guarantee of Service, Guarantee of Health Care, Fealty Oath.

Then he was free.

There was one small detail that Misato had neglected to mention. She doubted that Shinji would take it well.

He squinted against the source that lit the Middle Sector. Even despite his regained intense, quiet attitude, he had to stare at the park. He couldn't have seen anything like it before.

Astroturf and small trees with large leaves, bred for CO2 conversion; that was the extent the UN put into maintaining _nature_.

Shinji didn't stop, but he slowed down, began to slowly drift towards the green plain. It was cute. The Lieutenant could certainly understand the attraction.

"Later, Shinji." Misato said, trying to make it not sound like an order. "We have to get you situated first."

"I never thought…" the boy murmured. "I've seen it in the movies but... I thought this was all gone. Destroyed."

Misato slowed, fell into step beside Shinji. "You've been thinking of this as a dying world, haven't you?" she asked. "Its okay to admit it, many people think that, but they're wrong."

Shinji met her gaze briefly, then looked down at the path. "You don't say that. You can never admit that. If you do, you'll go crazy."

"We don't live in a dying world, Shinji," Misato said. "The world is constantly on the edge of rebirth. We…" but then she stopped and finished lamely, "things aren't as bad as they seem."

At that Shinji laughed, and didn't bother saying what they were both thinking. Things really couldn't get much worse.

They continued to the Housing Commission.

-

"No," the boy said.

"But the Commander…" the Housing Commissioner began.

"You're sick," Shinji was addressing Misato now. "No," he repeated.

-

As a senior member of staff, Misato enjoyed an apartment at Middle Sector, with a view. After accepting the position of liaison to the foreign pilots, she had had some engineers come in and put a door in the partition between her apartment and the one next to it, connecting them. She had felt pretty smart at the time.

In the Now, a stormy Shinji stalked about his new home as she tried her best to explain why he had to stay with her.

"Look, you don't even know your way around…" she was saying as the boy started opening cupboards in the kitchen. "You don't know where to go or who to talk to."

"When you were taking me down to that _thing_," the last word was vicious, "you had to look at a map."

Ouch.

"I wouldn't mind living across the hall or…" the boy began.

"These aren't standard living quarters!" she cut in. "Only senior staff have the opportunity to live here," and the rhetorical coupe de grace "I'm doing you a favor!"

The young man gave up.

-

Shinji had assumed that there was a certain entitlement to being an Eva pilot. At the moment it seemed an invitation to torture. He was used to privacy, accustomed to it. He was used to going to sleep with the reasonable certainty that either his chrono would wake him up or he would slowly shift from sleep to wakefulness of his own will.

He did not like the idea of someone getting in his room while he was asleep and rooting through his things, or maybe staring at him until he woke up, or suddenly jump on his bed while screaming at the top of their lungs. The Third Child wasn't exactly sure where he had picked up the notion that any of those things would happen, but none of them seemed too ridiculous at the moment.

He didn't care if it had been an emergency situation, he still couldn't trust Lt. Katsuragi after she had done. Trick him into thinking she was advocating for him, then get him from behind? No, that was not someone he wanted to live with.

And there was just too much... space. His room was twice the size of his previous barracks assignment, and had no lock on the door. He also had an entire washroom to himself. And a lounge area, with television. And three other furnished rooms. It was like he had inherited a whole block of housing. What was he supposed to do with it all?

Shinji sat on his bed. Tried to think of what would happen next.

They would put him back in that thing, the Evangelion. They would make him go aboveground and do… he didn't know what. And after however many hours of that, he would have this open and exposed apartment to come back to, that he had to share with the Lieutenant.

Suddenly Shinji didn't want to go to the park, or anywhere, for that matter. He lay down on his bed, wondered at how much more comfortable it was compared to his old foam mattress, or the couch in train segment four, or the hospital bed. He quickly fell into a dose.

Then Misato was in the room, jumping on his bed and screaming. Shinji jerked awake, but it had only been a night-fright, a dream that seemed real. He eyed the closed bedroom door warily, wishing for a lock, and then tried to go back to sleep.

-

In the ICU, Asuka's eyes opened.


	6. Meetings

Meetings

Shinji was dreaming of an endless beach. White sand meeting blue water for as far as the eye could see. Cool breeze, hot sand. A ringing sound echoed across the landscape from time to time, but he ignored it.

That was the house phone. Misato, trying to ask him if he'd like to meet Asuka, who was finally conscious.

Though the best way to describe the Second Child's state might have been "livid".

-

It was astonishing from a medical standpoint. Considering the intravenous nutrition she had been getting for while unconscious, the Second Child shouldn't have had the calories stand. Or throw things. Or scream at the top of her lungs in a language none of the attending staff could understand.Giving her a uniform and some privacy was the only thing they could do to calm her down.

The hospital disgorged Asuka just as Misato was jogging up to the building. The girl was still drawn and pale, and she moved a little slower then she might have. But she was determined.

"Wo ist mein Evangelion?" the Second Child asked after Lt. Katsuragi had identified herself.

Where is my Evangelion?

-

It had also been the most difficult part of the Eva project, and everyone associated with it knew that. After the prototype and test type had been created in Arkham shelter, the satellite NERV installations around the globe had begun the long process of assembling Production Type models. Germany had completed theirs some time ago, and for a long time sat around and wondered how exactly they were going to get it to NERV HQ. After listening to two months of unfeasible solutions, Ikari had told them to walk it over. He hadn't said it all that loudly, but it ended the discussion.

So Unit Two had submerged in the Atlantic, and spent three weeks running as well as it could along the ocean floor. Several of Unit Two's major organs had been removed to accommodate food and LCL stores for the pilot. Ritsuko had described it as being "a pretty gruesome hack," then gone into a startlingly vivid description of a variety of complicated and exhausting tortures she would like to put the German Technical Director through. Since it fell to _her_ department to repair the mangled thing to phenotype-spec.

The most stupefying thing was that it had worked.

-

Thirty minutes later the Lieutenant and Second Child were below Central Dogma, standing in Unit Two's hangar. The Evangelion was suspended by a complex apparatus that hooked into the recess in its armor at the shoulders, where the utility harness usually went. The chest plating had been removed or cut away to reveal the dark purple core beneath. A walkway extended into the bloodless wound, ending with a good view of the ruptured S2 organ, which approximated the Eva's heart.

Asuka made small moaning sounds as they entered the chamber. Seemed to be whispering reassurances to her Eva in German. The Second Child insisted that they walk into the chest cavity, where various technicians under the supervision of Maya Ibuki were debating whether to grow a new organ or try to salvage what they had. As they entered, Asuka caressed the hard muscle of the Eva's abdominal wall, and then ran a hand across the smooth lining of its stomach sac. The sight made Misato's own stomach turn uncomfortably.

After surveying the S2 organ, which had been smashed when the Eva impacted aboveground, Asuka started asking the engineers questions through Misato. The Second Child had questions about the status of at least thirty different components. The engineers were at first bemused, then flustered. Most made vague excuses and fled before the Second Child's focused technical inquiry.

Maya Ibuki, young protégée to Dr. Akagi, was the only one that managed to stand her ground. Only after Asuka seemed satisfied that her Eva was in capable hands did she let Misato lead her to the Commander's office.

-

Located in the uppermost levels of the management building, the Commander's office was huge in a way that shocked many visiting officials into stunned silence. In a world of cramped hallways and coffin-like housing, the entire Geo-Front was a bit breathtaking, but the Commander's office seemed to defy economy for the fun of it.

Some people thought Gendou Ikari was the most powerful man on Earth. There was little doubt in Misato's mind that his office figured largely into that belief.

Light filtered in through the windows that lined the perimeter of the massive chamber. The only other light source was a small lamp on Ikari's desk.

Asuka looked around the room with more wonder then she had spared the Middle Sector. After the long walk from entryway to desk, crafted to intimidate, Asuka saluted and recited her report to the Commander and his second, an eldery man named Kozo Fuyutsuki.

Naturally, neither of them knew German.

-

When the great mahogany doors closed behind them, Misato wanted to curl into a small ball and die. She knew German, she knew Nipponese, but it was becoming very apparent to her that there was more to being a translator then just that knowledge. At least it hadn't been a very dynamic conversation. Dr. Fuyutsuki, Ikari's second, had made a few polite inquiries about Asuka's trip. Had she seen any of the sunken cities? and so forth, and was particularly interested if she had experienced any auditory hallucinations. The girl had looked troubled at that, but had replied, in a way Misato read as uncertain, that she hadn't.

The conversation had lasted for what seemed like hours. The stress of being a translator had never been this bad in the tactical simulations! Misato withdrew a small box from her pocket and slipped a pill from it under her tongue. Her head throbbed painfully.

Asuka had outpaced Lt. Katsuragi in exiting the office. The older woman found the Second Child in the lobby on the first floor. In a wheelchair. She must have found it in a service closet on the way down.

Misato hurried over to her, not sure what to make of this. The girl was limp, her skin clammy. She shrugged away at the Lieutenants touch, and muttered "Bitte konnten Sie mich drücken?" Would you push me, please?

Then the Second Child fainted.

-

Misato took Asuka outside the management office. Headed for the hospital.

All that time. All that effort. Staying strong until she knew her Eva was safe and had a chance to report in. It was unreal. Wasteful. Brave and stupid, all at the same time.

The Lieutenant called the hospital.

"Yes?!" came a yell on the other end.

"I've got the Second Child here, she's just fainted, what do I do?" Misato talked face to shoulder, steering the wheelchair at the same time.

From the other end of the line came the sounds of a party. Someone doing karaoke, badly. The voice on the other end was screaming at them to shut up. After a few seconds, the voice came back, much more professional this time.

"Do her pupils respond to light?"

"I don't have a penlight, I'm out in the source!"

"Well, just cup your hand over an eye, that should be enough."

Misato stopped and did just that. The girl's pupil dilated.

"They're responding," the Lieutenant reported.

"Oh, then she's fine." The other voice sounded confident. "She's just running on empty. You should get her to drink some soup. She hasn't had anything solid in almost a month." In the background, the sound of music and laughter seemed to hesitantly increase.

"I think she needs to go back to the hospital." Misato said. "Its like she's gone completely limp."

The voice had an edge on it this time. "Yes, that's what people do when they go to sleep. Her system is exhausted. You need to get some soup at the refactory, or make some from an l-ration."

Misato stopped, trying to figure where she was. Halfway between her apartment and the hospital. The nearest cafeteria was… dammit!

"I'm closer to you, I'm heading your way," she shouted into the phone.

She was about to snap it closed when "Oh no you won't!" screeched at her.

She almost crushed the phone against her ear and started talking in hushed tones. She identified her rank, and what she was going to do when she found out whom this miserable little shit was. The voice cut off and was replaced by another.

"Bring her by, we'll give you something."

-

One portable IV stand, bag, and incision later, the Second Child opened her eyes.

"Dieser verfluchte platz wieder," she murmured. This damn place again.

The doctors and nurses were not particularly happy to see Asuka or Misato. One of them took the Lieutenant aside and explained things.

"She threatened a nurse," the older man began.

"What?"

"When she woke up, for a while she was fine, but we couldn't understand what she was saying, so we called you. While you were en route, she pushed one of the nurses back and threatened her with an instrument tray…" the man said the last somewhat lamely.

"That's it? You've reported worse from her while she was unconscious."

"Well, we've been briefed on her situation, and we are sympathetic… to a certain point. But listen, I've got a mammographist who has had a headache for three days. That girl destroyed an instrument tray bludgeoning her with it. We need to perform a CAT scan on the injury she caused, but someone fucked up downstairs and we don't have an OS." Now he was getting mad.

"We understand the effects isolation can have on a mind, three weeks in one of those _things_ must have been awful. We can also appreciate duty and dedication, but we have had it. WE need time to recuperate, the Second Child just needs some sugars."

-

In something of a daze, Misato left the hospital pushing Asuka. They had transferred her to a better wheelchair, which supported the IV drip without an additional stand. As she walked, the Lieutenant called Dr. Akagi. Aside from updating the status of the Second Child, she needed to vent.

Unfortunate.

"The subtext goes UNDER the title!" Ritsu greeted her agreeably. "Break it down! SUB- below, under, beneath; TEXT-words of speech appearing in print. SUBTEXT! I don't even want to open this report, Misato, there have to be at least three errors on the coversheet alon" Misato snapped the phone shut.

God. Dammit.

The Second Child was supposed to get the option to live separately… but that just wasn't viable. As Misato backed Asuka into the apartment, all the negative scenarios this arrangement could produce flashed through her mind. For Shinji this was necessary, but… Misato wasn't sure the two Children should be under the same roof.

Asuka safely deposited in the bedroom adjacent to Misato's, the Lieutenant went to check up on Shinji. The boy's door was closed, and upon opening it the Third Child woke up.

Screaming.

"Sorry, sorry! Just checking up on you," she stammered out, squelching the automatic impulse to retreat. The boy looked at her blearily, then drilled back under the covers.

Sleeping seemed like a good idea. Misato was still running on empty after finishing that UN Report. She'd only managed a thirty minute nap after coming home with Shinji. Then the hospital had called and related their immediate need for someone who spoke German.

The Lieutenant was nearly to her room when the telephone rang. Dr. Akagi wanted to chat about that report some more.

As she trudged out of the apartment, Misato wondered if she should have mentioned Asuka to Shinji. A mental shrug. He'd probably still be asleep when she got back.

-

Dammit, he couldn't get back to sleep!

Shinji had heard Misato's phone chirrup, listened to her muffled voice, and then the swoosh of a closing door. He lay still for a few minutes, hoping that delicious weariness would wash over him again. It didn't.

Rolling onto his back, Shinji stared at the ceiling, listened to the hum of the air recirculator. Faint memories of a beach and ocean playing through his head. A real nightmare. Being above ground, not having anything solid overhead. A terrifying sense of infinity.

His stomach growled.

Shinji hadn't eaten since the hospital. Now he was ravenous.

-

Interesting, Shinji thought as he picked through Lt. Katsuragi's pantry. The Lieutenant had actual food in her house.

Just as well, Shinji had no idea where the nearest refactory was.

Very interesting… he started taking inventory.

-

Asuka Langley Sohryu, whose lunatic bitchery had inspired several pantomimes at a certain hospital karaoke party, awoke to the sound of humming, and the smell of something awful.

"…aoi kaze ga ima, mune no doa wo tataite mo, watashi dake wo tada…" came a soft, preoccupied voice. "mitsumete, hohoende'ru anata, sotto fureru mono…" and then humming again.

-

Since he didn't have any sake, Shinji used some liquor he had found on the top shelf of the pantry. Looked like celebratory whiskey. Shinji doubted Misato would miss a bit.

Humming to himself while he let the rice steam, Shinji stared out into the Middle Sector, and again felt hypnotized. The whole Geo-Front was amazing. The space, the resources, the living place they had created and somehow managed to maintain for nearly fifteen years… For a moment his experience in Unit One was forgotten, and he started believing what Misato had said. A world on the edge of rebirth? Not so hard to believe, in this place.

Almost happy, he hummed and sang a gentle tune. The egg timer went off, he uncovered the rice and added the liquor, the salt, the sugar. Maybe it wouldn't be that bad. He would have to do it one way or another, doing it willingly had to be less painful then resisting. Maybe he could even make some friends here.

There was a swish, and a door opened behind him.

"Oh Lieutenant, I thou…" oh. Not Lt. Katsuragi.

"Wo ist Katsuragi?" the Second Child asked.

"She's… um…," the girl had definitely said the Lieutenant's name. "I'm sorry? Why are you here?" Shinji was at something of a loss.

"Ich spreche Nihongo." The girl stalked the room parallel to Shinji. "You do speak Nipponese, yes?"

"Uh, yeah." The boy responded. Her accent was awful, but he could understand her. "Katsuragi… the Lieutenant is not here. I don't know where she is."

The girl shuffled over to the table and sat.

"So, she took me home? I'm not a pet." The girl seemed to be speaking to herself.

"I know how you feel, I don't really want to be here myself." Shinji replied, not yet sure if he wanted this conversation or not.

"What, are you her boyfriend or something?"

Shinji took the rice off the stove, started mashing it. "Uh… no."

"Oh… brother?"

He set the white paste down, started arraying the kelp. "No… she says I have to stay here because I don't know my way around. I… dislike it."

This wasn't going to work, dammit. No sutare, and kelp was a poor substitute for nori. Shinji started going through the foodstuffs again.

"I think this is temporary," the girl was saying. "I'm too valuable for them to stuff in like just another sardine."

Shinji glanced at her. "What's wrong with being a sardine, exactly?" Was she being sarcastic or arrogant?

"I pilot Eva," the girl said confidently. "I deserve better."

A nervous tic appeared on Shinji's face.

"Oh, I hear it isn't that hard," he responded casually. Where did her entitlement come from? Was piloting really that awful?

"Not hard?!" the clatter of a chair on the floor, Shinji didn't dare turn. "You know nothing! It takes years of training!"

That had an unpleasant ring of truth to it.

"Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to make you angry," he took his head out of the pantry. Dammit, kelp it was. "Just something I heard someone say."

Rice was done. He started spreading out the kelp again.

"What are you doing, anyway?" came the voice behind him. "Smells acrid."

"Sushi." The boy responded. "I can't really make it here, but decided to try."

"…can I have some?" Shinji knew that voice. The young children back at his old shelter had gathered at the entrance of the refactory between meals had used that same tone. No, we really don't want what you have, but we're _hungry_!

"Sure… just be a minute."

-

Horseradish instead of wasabi, kelp instead of nori seaweed, white vinegar instead of wine, whiskey instead of sake… the sushi should have been terrible. Meat and fish paste from a k-ration were not the choice ingredients of a discerning sushi chef. Shinji served his bastardized product anyway. A glass of water, a cigarette tray with some old soy sauce in it, and the Second Child was set.

Shinji retired to a distance he hoped was safe.

Asuka ate. Wolfishly. Shinji had given them both four futomaki each, and was halfway through his first when she asked for more.

"I can't. I used up all the rice." He started chewing the sushi. Interesting...

"Well, then give me yours."

Shinji swallowed, popped another sushi into his mouth; opted for a diversionary tactic. "What's it like piloting Eva?" he asked.

"I want more of what you are eating."

He gave her one of his two remaining futomaki.

"What do you think it's like? There's really no way to describe it," the girl said as she ate. "It's… why are you here again? Are you the Lieutenants live-in cook or does she just like little boys?"

"What? No! It's not l" And then he saw it. The hint of a grin at one corner of her mouth.

She was toying with him. How long had it taken her to figure it out?

They made eye contact briefly.

"That bottle, bring it over here," Asuka said, her voice now… different. She was talking about the whiskey he had left on the countertop.

"No… let me make you something else." A slight grin. This wasn't… so bad. "What would you like?"

-

Misato had now gone twenty-five hours without sleep. In addition to being totally exhausted after finishing the first draft of that evil fucking report, arguing with Shinji, and then acting as the Second Child's personal assistant, she now wanted to kill Ritsuko Akagi, her best friend. With a baseball bat. Or a recoiless hammer. The Lieutenant wasn't feeling picky.

That woman. Was. Impossible! Three hundred and seventy corrections in a forty-two page paper. And then fifty-three corrections to the draft after that! No one in the UN paid much attention to the official report anyway, goddammit!

And on the way out, dear Ritsu had added "And feed my cats."

The claw marks on Misato's right hand throbbed.

She stumbled through the apartment door. Saw Shinji out on the balcony, staring at the Middle Sector. Asuka was fiddling with a video game console Misato hadn't touched in nearly five years. That familiar organic breeze blew in from the balcony, rolled over the weary Lieutenant.

This was the new normal. These kids. Living with people. Sharing her life. It was scary.

It was very much like coming home.


	7. Training

Training

The Second and Third Children sat facing one another, each with a fork in hand.

"You first," Asuka said. "You made it."

Shinji looked down at what was, hypothetically, a casserole. Not tradition Japanese fair, but the only thing he knew how to make with the meager supply of actual food the Lieutenant had Okayed them to exhaust. Except for the whiskey, which she had snatched off the table and secreted in her room.

The casserole twitched. A pocket of sauce shifting, surely. Everything that had gone in to it had been dead a long time, down to the salted meat and the tinned tomato sauce.

But knowing everything that had gone into the casserole failed to explain why the lump of food was green. Or why it smelled like vinegar and mold and appeared to be turning the glass beneath it brown.

Shinji took a bit up in his fork, didn't examine it to closely, and ate.

Oh, what the hell.

It was not very good. In retrospect, the sushi hadn't been either. But it was real food. _Real food_. Shinji had spent most of his life eating A-rations and K-rations. And the occasional pre-Impact MRE. The meat and vegetables and fungus the horticultural sector of his shelter produced fed right into the ration processing plant.

Shinji had once been pulled into a double shift to cater some UN Executive event. They had made soup with green plants and wet red meat. It had smelled wonderful. He hadn't been allowed to taste it.

And though he was no longer a cook, Shinji was already noting how the casserole could be made passable to an officer's palette. Some sugar to even out the taste, a bit of starch scraped from an I-ration tin to thicken it out…

Shinji was halfway through the dish when Asuka started making hacking sounds. She had a fork in her mouth and was staring at him in a way that was... disquieting. She hacked again, her lips a tight line. She slowly got up, went to the washroom, and started throwing up.

A screech emanated from the Lieutenant's room, her alarm clock. Asuka continued her retching. Shinji hoped it was theatrical. The alarm was cut short and the Lieutenant emerged disheveled and very much wearing what Shinji had last seen her in. She trudged over to the table, glanced at the mostly-eaten casserole, sniffed it, and plopped down.

"Miss Sohryu seems to have a refined palette" Misato commented absently, digging Shinji's fork out of the casserole dish and helping herself. She took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. "Needs more sugar."

The Lieutenant leaned back in the chair and balanced it on two legs. "Pilot Sohryu," she called. "We have something official to discuss."

The Second Child was nothing if not a good soldier. She quickly emerged from the bathroom, a piece of coarse tissue against her mouth. Shinji noted some slime on her cheek and inwardly winced. She had really been sick.

Asuka sat between the Lieutenant and Shinji, and shot the Third Child a withering look before turning her attention to her superior.

"Ja, ma'am?"

"Japanese please, this concerns the both of you." Misato took another bite of the casserole.

"It was decided, while you two were playing house and drinking my liquor, that the two of you will receive private instruction from a NERV…" and here she seemed to be searching for a word "…tutor."

"This training will begin immediately for the Third Child" she nodded to Shinji, "and the Second Child, once she has recovered."

Asuka began to object, but Misato silenced her with a gesture. "This is not about the Evangelion Project, not directly."

"Now, while Pilot Sohryu is an experienced Eva pilot, you, Shinji, have virtually no experience. So in addition to your… tutelage, with the other pilots, you must also visit Rit… Dr. Akagi every day for additional training. Questions?"

Why are you addressing me as "Shinji" and her as "Pilot Sohryu"?

Asuka was up out of her chair, not looking like she needed time to recover at all. "I shouldn't need to take part in this idiotic training! All I have to do is pilot Eva, right? I should be working on Unit Two, not hanging out with this idiot..." she pointed to Shinji and wiped the smear of slime from her cheek, "…who can't even cook properly. I already know how to tie my shoes and count to ten. Taking part in his education for whatever reason, team-building? isn't necessary."

Shinji stared. Whatever pretense of camaraderie he and the Second Child had shared was gone. Calling him an idiot? What on fuck?

The Lieutenant was not at all phased. She just stared at the girl pilot for a moment, and asked her what she thought of the UN.

"They are fucking moles. Digging deeper holes as the wind strips the earth away. They have power only because they control the production of N2…" Asuka struggled to find the Nipponese word, "…items."

Misato leaned further back in her chair and Shinji was certain, so certain, that she would fall backward. "Miss Sohryu, are you aware of the Common Defense Treaty, put in to effect in 2012?" Now the Lieutenant wore a smirk.

Asuka's eyes got far away, and began to bounce from left to right, as though she were reading something inside her head.

"Oh…" she said, quietly. "Oh."

Misato's grin grew a bit, and with a nod she turned back to Shinji. "Do not worry about it, your tutor can probably explain it better. Oh, I forgot…" she slammed her chair back onto four legs, rose, and disappeared into her room. She came out with two watches, which she placed on the table. One watch had a narrow, black leather band, the other a band of white plastic. Misato pushed the black banded to Asuka, the white to Shinji.

"This is your watches, or 'chrono', if you're used to the UN slang. When the face is green," she indicated the green LCD on Asuka's watch, which displayed military time in thick black digits, "you're awake. When the face is black, you sleep. You kids probably don't have any concept of a day/night cycle, but these are to keep your circadian rhythm healthy. You should be at this location when the watches turn black, but if not, return here immediately and go to sleep. You are about to become very busy, and I doubt you will have much difficulty resting. If you try to sleep when the watch's face is green, it will administer a tiny shock that should stimulate your system and make sleep impossible. We are not cruel, but you must adjust to our norms to function well here."

Asuka snatched up the watch, then went to her room and shut the door. Misato watched her leave, then turned to Shinji.

"So, how'd I do?" she grinned. Shinji almost felt like grinning back. But Katsuragi was still the one that had knocked him out and dumped him into the Eva.

"Miss… Lieutenant?" he kept his speech formal. This business with using his first name still bothered him. "You said that I would be taught with the other pilots? Plural, ma'am?"

"Oh," Misato was up and opening the fridge. "Rei, I never mentioned Rei, did I? She is the First Child, sorry sorry, there just hasn't been time to bring her over."

Shinji looked at Asuka's closed door. "Is she…" are all pilots like Sohryu?

Misato brought out a jug of thick, brown liquid, and saw where he was looking. "Oh, I believe she and Miss Sohryu are very different." She opened a cupboard and got three glasses, which she filled with the brown liquid and placed on the table before seating herself.

"But I was not being very nice to Miss Sohryu. She is just as new to the way of things here as you are, I am afraid. Shouldn't be too hard on her, she comes from a very different situation, and she has just been through what might be a major trauma."

Shinji started to ask what major trauma, exactly, but Misato stopped him. "That is something you should ask her about."

He took a sip from the glass in front of him. Thick. Rich. Bitter-sweet. Chocolate milk? Shinji looked up at Misato, licking his lips, then drained the glass. Misato grinned and raised her eyebrows "Not everything here is stale or dry."

For a moment, Shinji took the Lieutenant's statement an entirely different way. Before he could examine it too closely though, Asuka emerged in her NERV uniform, watch strapped around her left wrist.

"Bere... Ready for duty, ma'am," Asuka belted out sharply.

Misato shook her head and handed the Second Child a glass of chocolate milk. "Here we do not stand on ceremony, Miss Sohryu. You may call me Misato if you like, so long as I can call you by your given name. I would appreciate this, because I'm getting really fucking tired of this military dialect."

Misato drained her glass of milk, Asuka had not yet sipped hers. "Anyway, if you are in such a hurry to feel the burn, be my guest. Simon will be overjoyed that you both will be playing catch-up at the same time."

The Lieutenant glanced at her own watch. "Oh, you're due in thirty minutes. Shinji, hurry up."

Shinji hurried past Asuka, who was sniffing her milk.

-

"It was a stupid idea to take her home, and a stupid idea to give her to Simon before she is fully recovered," Ritsuko commented absently to the form draped over the couch in her office. "Boy-people and girl-people are different, Misato. You see…"

"Spare me, Ritsu," the Lieutenant moaned. "If I had given her a direct order to stay put, she would have gone and done pushups in her room, and read Sun Tzu or something. Those guys in Germany fucked her up sideways. At least she hasn't assault the Third Child with an instrument tray yet."

"I... what?"

"Nothing. Nevermind. She's just got this military decorum thing going on that is, ah, humbling. And embarassing. People under my command are nothing like her."

Ritsuko noisily sipped her coffee, her sign she was not interested in playing psychologist. "I'd suggest you separate them. Major Greene will not go easy on them, and their new diet is going to make things even worse. They'll want a place to retire, some place their own. Rei's been fine in the barracks. We can put them all in the same private wing, the place is so huge they'd probably never find one another without a map, anyway."

Misato lifted the book off her eyes. "Haven't you been listening? Asuka is military. The fucking German Branch, I don't know what they're doing over there, but it sounds chickenshit. Old school chickenshit. We've relaxed regulations here because it boosts morale and actually made people work better, harder. We are a military facility, but we're also stuck here for the duration. The German branch, from what I've seen at the vid conferences, is fucking Draconian. I'll spare you the Nazi reference."

Ritsuko sipped her coffee again, quietly. "I see your point, even if her particular conditioning benefits us in the short term, her lack of social skills will lead to her isolating herself. That and the language barrier could lead to a breakdown. Bravo Lieutenant Katsuragi, you engaged me intellectually."

Lieutenant Katsuragi grinned, and tossed the book in her hands to Ritsuko. "You keep reading stuff like this, engaging you intellectually will just get easier."

In Ritsuko's hands was a romance novel. The scientist looked at it sadly, then at Misato.

"We've all got our dreams, Misato. Even if it hurts us, we've still got to feed them."

-

Misato had given Asuka and Shinji very clear instructions on how to locate Simon Greene. He would be waiting for them in the sixth exercise yard on the third floor of the Outer Sector. Everything that followed that information had apparently been a vicious lie, concocted by the Lieutenant to force the displeasure of Shinji's company on Asuka, Private First-Class, who was, in her own words, "loyal to a fault".

Shinji would have totally ignored Asuka's diatribe and concentrated on more personally relevant matters, like figuring out how to loosen the collar of his uniform, but every so often Asuka would need to stop and rest.

They would sit on a bench in one of many white corridors, distinct from the last white corridor they had been in by the alphanumeric designation painted in black where the hallways intersected. This theoretically gave anyone who got lost a sporting chance of getting out before succumbing to starvation. Shinji had developed the irrational that they would stumble on a corpse in a NERV uniform, skin dried and flakey in this damnable air so recycled it hurt to breath.

That image was familiar. Stirred deeper thoughts he did not wish to bear out at the moment. So something that should have seemed funny was instead a real fear.

Asuka kept her distance, even on the bench. Shinji had tried to apologize for the casserole, but the red-head just muttered in reply and ignored him. In a funny way, this behavior was actually become personable. Shinji couldn't help but notice how poorly Asuka filled out her uniform - how thin her arms were, the way her legs shook, the dents in the chest of her starched uniform that indicated a hollow cavity… and yet here she was alongside him. She was driven to a fault, he could see this, even with his meager experience.

The corridors were lined with many identical doors. Shinji and Asuka were supposed to find Greene by virtue of an open door. At each intersection they would stare off into what was often a fuzzy horizon, each identical hallway extending beyond their ability to focus.

They were currently traveling down corridor 3A. Their ultimate destination lay shortly after an intersection between 7R and G2. Asuka had quickly deduced that all corridors beginning with a number ran perpendicular to the ones beginning with a letter. This was the system to which Shinji was accustomed, and was standard in all shelters as far as he knew, but he kept his mouth shut because he was very certain that, despite her frail appearance, Asuka could hurt him if she wanted to.

The problem was, Asuka and Shinji were both wrong. The hall designations did not proceed with any rhyme or reason. Misato's directions were useless. Corridor 7G turned into 8O. The two other hallways at the intersection were 7A and 7L. The hallways were not alphabatized. The numbers seemed to build, but Shinji couldn't see how, couldn't understand how the system worked, and was beginning to wonder how long it would take them to find their way back to the Middle Sector.

The two pilots were starting to get thirsty when Rei found them.

-

Shinji had no idea they were being followed until a soft voice called from behind them.

"Are you pilots Sohryu and Ikari?"

Asuka spun around, and Shinji twitched. He was going to turn around, and there was going to be a dead body there, dead for so long and whispering to them. They had somehow avoided seeing it and now… he pushed those idiotic thoughts aside and turned.

Rei was small and ghostly. Her flesh was almost the same shade as the hallway, and her eyes... Shinji was used to seeing people with pink eyes, sometimes the body just stopped producing the melanin that colored the eye, if hidden from the sun long enough. He had never seen eyes with blood-red irises though. He had seen brown and black hair turn the color of strained seaweed, but had never seen hair as shockingly snow-white as Rei's before, either. It almost looked blue. She was clearly Nipponese.

The First Child had a uniform jacket tied around her waist. Above that she wore a gray tank top and sports bra. Her expression was utterly blank.

"Yeah, we are they, and you are Pilot Ayanami, right?" Asuka asked the girl in awkward Nipponese as she approached, folded one arm behind her back, and stuck the other forward. "I am Pilot Sohryu, pleased to make your acquaintance."

The First looked down at Asuka's hand, and gingerly shook it. She did not act shy, but uncertain, tentative. Then she stepped back and extended her hand to Shinji as Asuka had done, and Shinji shook it. "Nice to meet you, Pilot Rei… sorry, Ayanami?"

Dammit. Katsuragi had him using first names now.

The girl nodded. "Please follow me, Major Greene is waiting for us."

-

The Outer Sector was a hollow sphere around the rest of the Geo-Front. The hallways actually curved around, but the sector was so large Shinji and Asuka hadn't noticed. This sector was meant to be administrative offices for the city NERV planned to build once conditions outside became "more favorable" (as Rei described it), and evacuation shelters for the residents of that as-yet unrealized city.

For now these hallways, and most of the rooms they lead to, were empty. The numeric system was not based on the alphabet at all, but instead the motto of NERV, "God's in His Heaven, All's Right With the World." "God's in His Heaven" corridors ran North to South, "All's Right With the World" ran East to West. Relative to the four entrances one could enter the Outer Sector from, of course the hallways wrapped around. The two lost pilots had been on the G and O in "GOD", and between the A and L in "ALLS". This system, Rei explained, was devised to confuse any "military incursion".

Shinji didn't like the sound of that.

The First Child informed the two pilots of these things as she walked ahead. Asuka was glaring at the other girl, her eyes roaming from feet to shoulders. The red-head absently crossed her arms, squeezed them.

It took Shinji a moment to figure that out. Rei's body was compact, but solid. She was _fit_. Asuka was probably feeling intimidated.

No. That was the wrong word. Pilot Sohryu was probably feeling _provoked_. Shinji smiled at the thought. It wasn't really fair, he barely knew her at all.

And he supposed Asuka's condition wasn't really funny. At all.

_Major trauma_, Lt. Katsuragi had said.

After several turns, Rei stopped at a seemingly random door and pressed her hand into a depression in the door's middle. The portal opened with a hiss.

"We were informed that the door would be open." Asuka stiffly observed.

"It is opened when you are supposed to be here," Rei answered. "It will open for me because my hand-print is coded in to it. If you are late, you will not be able to enter."

Behind Rei, Asuka gritted her teeth.

They descended a darkened stairwell.

-

"So, do you have any new insight into the Third Child?" Ritsuko asked.

They were in the refactory now. Ritsuko claimed to be nervous about allowing Misato near the equipment in her office for any length of time, but they were really there because it was red meat day.

Misato tore off some beef kabob and chewed thoughtfully. "Can't get a read on him," she said she chewed. "Sometimes it's easy, he's a kid, you know? Other times he seems a lot older. Maybe that's his father in him. Wish we had an up-to-date psychological profile."

Ritsuko nibbled at her beef and studied Misato for a moment.

"You like him, don't you?"

Misato bit through her teriyaki stick. Then she glared at her friend and took a swig of water. "You're sick, Akagi, you know that?"

Ritsuko was grinning and shaking her head. "All I'm saying, Lieutenant Katsuragi, is that if you DID have a psychological profile of the Third Child, you'd be most interested in whether or not he preferred older women." Then Ritsuko laughed and spun in her chair just as Misato tried to kick her.

Katsuragi's face was red, Ritsuko knew her friend had never been good at hiding her emotions, aside from the military rote she spouted when talking to the Commander.

"I'm joking, dear Misato," Ritsuko knew she was pushing her luck. "After all, we both know you're so full of hormone repressent, you couldn't possibly get wet enough to…"

She barely dodged the punch.

-

Major Simon Greene was very tall and very broad. He had a buzz cut, and a surprising amount of neck for someone who seemed to be nothing but muscle. He wore a tank-top like Rei's, and shorts with small shoes, a type of which Shinji had never seen before.

From the entrance, they had descended three flights of darkened stairs and emerged into an entirely different world. The training yard was expansive, and lit by large halogen lamps in the ceiling. The air was wetter and easier to breath.

The sight of astroturf beneath halogens made Shinji uneasy again. More old memories. He bit it back though. Wouldn't be able to function if he turned everything into Hellish nostalgia.

They crossed a catwalk which ran across one side of the training yard. This gave them a view of a track and obstacle course before Rei guided them into a building that took up about a fourth of the space in the yard. Where Simon Greene was waiting.

Simon, who had not spoke at the stairwell, finally introduced himself when all three pilots were situated behind a long table, Shinji between Rei and Asuka.

"My name is Simon Greene," he started in English. "MAJOR, Simon Greene. Now, I know neither PFC Sohryu, nor Pilot Ikari understand me, so Miss Ayanami will act as translator until the two of you have a decent grasp of English." Rei recited what the Major had said. The Major nodded when she was done, then continued: "You will address me as Major or, since we cannot stand on ceremony at all times, Mr. Greene. I am here to put you through boot camp."

Shinji looked down at his feet, thinking he'd misunderstood. Simon didn't grin.

"Boot camp is what all soldier have to pass through before entering into the army. I have been charged with developing a program to take young adults born after Second Impact to an acceptable state of physical fitness. My methods in accomplishing this are entirely my prerogative. I will entertain criticism from any of you only after the program is complete."

Shinji began to feel queasy.

"Now, I understand you three are all part of Project E. I am classified to know this, but I have no interest in expanding that knowledge. You are not special here. I am not your parent. I am a very mean motherfucker and I am going to do my very best to remind you that every second you are here."

Asuka opened her mouth. Major Greene interrupted her. "Shut up, Private First Class, I'm not done yet." Rei repeated it impassively.

"Your training is not limited to physical activity. You will have a one hour period…" he motioned for them to stand, "follow me, please." He lead them back to the stairwell, where he flicked on the lights and opened a door Shinji hadn't noticed. Inside was a kitchen. Simon waited until they were all inside, then continued: "You will have a one hour period every morning to eat here. You are not to eat any food that does not come from here. If you are not on time, you will have less time to eat. If you are more then an hour late, I will remind you of this fact aggressively. Until you sweat blood, to be precise. Storage-boys stock this place, I don't know what is in here, and I'm not your fucking chef. That" he pointed to a box, "is a microwave, and that" he pointed to the refrigerator "is a fridge. Are we all clear? Good."

The Major lead them back through the stairwell and on to the catwalk, this time taking them down to the yard itself.

"This is Training Yard Six. It has, up to this point, been used by only myself and Miss Ayanami. You will exercise here twelve hours a day. When you are in this place, you're in my house, understand? You don't sleep or screw in my house, do you understand!"

Shinji blushed. Especially since the translation came from Rei.

"You all have your own beds in other parts of the Geo-Front, do whatever the fuck you want there. You don't sleep in the sand pits. You don't mess around behind equipment where you think I can't see you. You don't collapse outside my door and sleep in the hallways. I'm going to beat the living hell out of you, and then you're going to walk back to your beds and use them. And next time you get out of them, you'll be a'walkin' right back to me. Get used to the idea."

He walked over to the building in the yard and gestured through one of the paned windows to the bottom floor. "Designed it like there was an exterior, can't figure out why. This is the weight room." He rounded the building and led them through another door with a wire-latticed glass window in it that seemed to glow blue. Inside was a large pool. "This thing's filters only run while when you aren't here, so if you piss in it, you swim in it." He showed them where the changing rooms, scuba equipment, and other pool peripherals were kept. The smell of chlorine made the air thick and difficult to breath.

"In deference to the young ladies," Major Greene began as they left the pool room, "I have been instructed to give you this one minor option: the young ladies may be allowed privacy in the pool, should they decide they want it. I think that's too fucking carebear, but that allowance came from higher up. They also get their own locker and bathing facilities. Of course."

The Major led them along the side of the yard, away from the building and the pool, and opened another door. "This is the shooting gallery." The Major began, placing a pair of headphones on his ears. Rei did the same. Asuka quickly followed suit. Shinji was about to ask why when the Major picked up a small pistol and fired it down the range. The sound reverberating through the concrete room knocked Shinji off his feet. Behind his left eye, a seed of pain sprouted.

"We wear these," Major Greene indicated his headphones "to nullify the sound that would eventually render you completely deaf otherwise."

Shinji was trying to blink his headache away. Why the hell would anyone fire a weapon without those muting things on!

The Major showed them the more obvious parts of the training yard, the track and obstacle course and the pole vault. He showed them where the gear for these was stored, how it was stored, and then detailed what he would do if it was not stored properly. "If I find one thing out of place," Major Greene said in a distressingly affable tone, "I'll run all three of you ragged. I don't care who did it."

When this was done, he led them back to the meeting area above the weight room. "This," the Major pointed to a door opposite the entrance. "Is my office. You may knock on this door and enter only if there is a fire, gibbering amorphous somethings are erupting out of the wall, you really want to find out how far I can push you before a bone snaps, or if you smell a decomposing corpse and I am nowhere in evidence." Simon Greene hit the table with his open palm. "You are here, as you were before, at 0800 hours sharp. The outside door will open at 0630, you have until 0800 to do what you like. At 0800 I will distribute your exercise schedules, which you will follow until 1200. Then you can do whatever you like for an hour. I recommend food, and lots of it. 1300 to 1700 will be spent following an the schedule originally provided. From 1700 to 1900, you can do anything you want but leave. After this, the day is completed, you need to leave."

Simon gestured to Rei, "Miss Ayanami has been doing this for three weeks now, but her regime will be adjusted so you all complete it at the same time. After two weeks of training the door will open for you IF you are consistently prompt and IF I'm not feeling like a bastard, otherwise the door shuts at 0700, and I'll be the one letting you in."

Then Major Greene smiled.

"Do you have any questions, _children_?"

Shinji raised a tentative hand.

"Too fucking bad."


	8. Mute Shadows

Mute Shadows

Shortly after being introduced to Rei Ayanami, Major Simon Greene, and the Sixth Training Yard, Asuka and Shinji were on the track, running. Or trying to. The Major laughed as they completed their third lap, and reminded them that they had six more to go. On the sideline, Rei watch impassively.

-

After their briefing, they had been shown into separate changing areas attached to the weight room. Locker rooms. They had exchanged their starchy NERV uniforms for tank-tops, running shorts, and the small shoes Shinji had noticed on the Major. Running shoes.

Shinji had changed quickly, not liking the too-large locker room. The floor was cold, and Shinji felt acutely alone, something he had not felt since first stepping off the maglev in the Geo-Front's Understation.

He had emerged from the locker room very aware of his bare arms and legs. He felt underdressed. Rei appeared from the girl's changing room. Shinji had not seen her go in. She had shed her uniform pants and issued shoes for clothing identical to Shinji's. She made brief eye contact, then sat on a bench and lowered her gaze to the floor.

"Hey, idiot, are you out there?" Asuka's caustic voice floated out from the girl's changing area.

Shinji examined his feet. Sat on the bench opposite Rei.

"Ikari?!" the voice was getting louder. God.

"Yes Pilot Sohryu, I'm here." He didn't know what else to say. His compassion for Asuka's physical state was running low. She must have gotten dressed and seen herself in the mirror all... what was the word. Emaciated? Thin. Weak-looking.

She had been in that red Eva, and something had happened to her. Shinji did not know what, but it had shrunken her… and she was too proud to show it, too proud to come out in shorts and a tank-top. He'd known her for two days, and already understood that.

Shinji did not relish the idea of confronting Major Greene, but knew what was coming.

"Go tell Major Greene that I am… that I want to discuss something with him."

Shinji looked at Rei for… something. The girl met his gaze and stood.

"Pilot Sohryu," Rei began. "If Pilot Ikari engages the Major in conversation on your behalf, he will be punished. You were given orders by a superior officer, to change and be ready for the first half of your daily exercise regime. Are you disobeying those orders?"

Shinji waited. No sound came from the change room. Pressing either side of his head in an attempt to stave off his growing headache, Shinji turned and opened the door. Go get Major Greene. Fine!

"Wait dumkoff," Asuka's voice came from behind him. Shinji turned.

She stood just in front of Rei, dressed just as the white-haired pilot was. She had one leg on a workout bench, tying her running shoes. "You go out ahead, that mean bastard will take it out on us."

The clothes had not been kind to her, as Shinji had feared. He knew in a glance that if he got a clear view of her, he wouldn't be able to look away.

They left the weight room, all three of them together. Gone to the meeting room. Major Greene was already there, feet up on the table, three folders in front of him.

"Okay kiddies," the man growled. Rei translated. "This here is your physical workup the hospital just copied over."

The large man had brushed Rei's to one side, "Already know what is in here, already know it's outta date."

He had picked up Shinji's folder and opened it, "Hmm let's see. Shinji Ikari, 15 years old, blood-type O negative, yaddah yaddah yaddah." The Major flipped through several sheets. "Looks like they got you baking on the same chemical shit as everyone else, terrific."

The Major had closed Shinji's medical history and tossed it on the table. Snatched up Asuka's.

"Mmm hmm, pre-menstrual, 14 years, Military Designation A0-blah blah blah…" he turned the page, then another, and then something caught his eye. He looked up and appraised his new female student more closely.

"The Hell?" the Major muttered, turning the next page. He appeared to read the whole page, then turned to the next page and skimmed it, and the page after that. Then he closed the folder and stood.

"You, whatsyourname, you come with me," he gestured to Asuka, and then to Rei "and you, Miss Ayanami, since our drama queen don't know the English good."

Major Greene took both girls in to his office, leaving the door open. Shinji started to get up, but the Major's bellowing voice had kept him in place.

"This ain't your affair, Mister Ikari, you _will_ stay put," came Rei's softer translation.

After five minutes the three re-emerged, Asuka with a bandage on her arm. She absently touched the gauze, winced. Shinji finally allowed his gaze to linger on her in those moments before she sat down, when she seemed more concerned with staring straight ahead than noticing him. Her wrists… they were so much thicker then her arms… her joints bulged out like a doll's. Shinji barely tore his gaze away, and felt sick.

After ridiculing them for another five minute, the Major had taken them down to the training yard proper, and instructed them to run three miles.

-

Now Shinji was drenched in sweat and freezing, each step shooting pain up his legs, each rapid breath burning in his chest. The Major was yelling at him to slow his breathing down, but Shinji couldn't. If he didn't keep breathing as fast as possible, he was pretty sure he'd die. Ahead of Shinji, on the outside curve of the track, Asuka was throwing herself forward. Shinji could hear the constant stream of German coming from her, but was very quickly losing interest in it, and her, and everything else around him.

They completed the sixth lap. The Major was screamed that if they did not wrap it up in six minutes, he'd make them run another mile.

There was no way, no way Shinji could keep on going. The pain in his chest was there to stay now, not just when he breathed. He began to imagine the bones in his legs splintering apart like shale rock. His emotions began to rage, from hate to fear to something poetic, but all totally random, just his brain trying to keep him awake and moving forward.

They completed the seventh lap. The Major was looking at his stopwatch and shaking his head. Rei was now standing beside him and leaning forward against the rail that separated the sandpits and pole-vault inside the track from the track itself. Noticing that took too much effort for Shinji.

His name was Shinji, right?

Ahead of him, Asuka was still throwing herself forward. Shinji noted the red stain on her arm, blooming beneath the gauze of her bandage…

…like a flower, a pretty, pretty flower.

No more flowers, no more plants, no more Mother, no more Sun…

Just run shut up and run, you idiot!

Shinji wasn't sure, but thought the Major had probably screamed that last fleeting thought. Maybe he was talking as he ran, he couldn't tell anymore.

Eighth lap. Shinji could tell because the Major's screaming got louder, then diminished.

The lights in the yard, the hally-ogen, were too bright. Burned his eyes. His body was now going from cold to hot and back to cold. Motes of light danced in front of his eyes, and he felt his stomach heave. The casserole, wanting out. Just a bit more, a bit more…

Hey hey hey hey

"Hey! I said stop, dammit!"

The world focused, and Major Greene was kneeling in front of him, staring. Shinji was on the ground. Could not recall how he had gotten there. Somewhere off to the side, Asuka was cursing loudly. Major Greene looked away from Shinji for a moment.

"Thank you Miss Ayanami, please help whatshername to the kitchen."

Major Greene turned back to Shinji and tapped his chrono. Held up two fingers. Two hours.

Then, he got up and walked away.

-

Asuka had not been awake on the last lap of Major Greene's merry little jaunt. The steroid cocktail he had given her had kept her going, even when her legs began to itch and turn blue. As she struggled just to stand against Ayanami, Asuka could only think about how much she wanted to kill Greene. Through her pain and utter exhaustion, she saw herself kicking his teeth in and drowning him in the pool, or spraying his brains all over with a pistol from the firing range, maybe after taking out a kneecap or two and letting that crazy, sadistic fuck enjoy a sucking chest wound for a while.

Asuka squeezed Rei's shoulder until the girl stopped, and turned to look at Major Greene, who was kneeling in front of Shinji. Her violent fantasies seemed to come to life around his image, and suddenly it was too much for her to bear. She lurched forward, pushed Ayanami away, and staggered into the weight room.

She went for the changing room. Stumbled over a workout bench and fell. Crying silently now, hissing through her teeth, Asuka pulled herself up and forward. From behind her Rei reported that training would resume in two hours' time.

Asuka kept her face away from the First Child, and staggered in to the changing room.

She was completely drained, and confused. For a moment, when she had looked at the Major, she had felt his skin twitch and part beneath her hands. She had felt the blood splash on her skin. Could smell it steam off her body. It had seemed so real.

It frightened her.

Her legs hurt, her chest hurt, her joints were even more swollen then before. She was covered in a cold sweat that felt like slime. Her flesh felt ready to drip off her bones, like warm wax.

She lean-walked down a row of unused lockers, to the communal shower room. She sat on the changing bench and quickly undressed, trying not to look at her diminished thighs and the downy blonding red hair between them. Pushed off the wall, walking arms out to balance, she made it to one of the metal columns that rose from the ground and twisted the handle built into it at waist level. Hot water gushed out, not just from the spigot above her but from every showerhead in the column. She slowly fell to the base of the column and let the warmth wash over her.

This was too much. She was pushing herself far too hard. But it had to be done. Why? She couldn't say. Only that it made sense. Only that it was right.

That damned idiot and his casserole. She could feel it turning over in her stomach, sticky and cold.

Shinji Ikari. Huh. He was the type of guy that survived because of the UN. Survived because he was sheltered, not because he had value, or the means to shelter himself.

Strange, thinking about him now. Was the nudity that did it, and the openness of this damned shower. Probably the adrenaline from Greene's steroid shot too.

Guys and girls. Get close to one another. Natural. There had been so few children after-Impact. So few people to pick from. He was an example of that. Of the breeding pool.

An unexpected realization. It passed quickly. Disgusting.

And being here. In this place. Even though it was tearing her apart. Even though it wasn't doing her any good at all. Its...

Like...

-

The kitchen would have interested Shinji. Really. If only the stupid thing would stay still long enough for him to get a decent look at it. His vision still swam, and the only way he could get his feet to stop hurting was to put them up in the chair on the other side of the table. God, he wanted this to be over.

It took a while for his curiosity of the kitchen to outpace the physical discomfort of walking. But eventually he did get to his feet and totter over to the shelves. Took in the cardboard boxes and small things in shiny wrappers. He selected two C-rations. Wrapped in aluminum, the size of a large book, C-rations were the only familiar thing he saw. Or thought he saw. Short term memory was a bit of a problem at the moment.

Shinji tore in to the aluminum apart and was surprised to find some crackers, jam, a small block of cheese, a tin with an English label, and several bars of something.

A C-ration contained a block of cheese, some powdered milk, and sometimes crackers. Shinji yanked the aluminum wrapper close to his face and tried to get the letters to stop spinning.

Oh, it was an MRE. A pre-Impact ration.

"Good enough," he muttered, and ate.

-

After informing Pilot Sohryu of her schedule, Rei Ayanami had gone to the pool, put on a bathing suit, and floated at the surface for a time. She had eaten before the other two pilots had arrived, and eating again would only cause her sickness. Swimming was a low impact activity that would not leave her too tired if the Major decided she too needed to run three miles, though he might not ask her to do anything at all today.

The other pilots confused her. She had never been around other people her own age before, and was mystified by their behavior. The girl, Sohryu, was doing herself great harm in coming today. Rei was certain the Major was not happy with her condition, and would have sent the girl back to her residence immediately had his own program forbidden him from doing so.

The point of this program was to make them physically fit. They were a prototype for future classes that would contain the entire youth population of the Geo-Front, eventually. The Second Child, for whatever reason, had made the decision to hinder the project by damaging herself, which would make things more difficult for all three pilots in the future.

The Commander's son, the Third Child, was an equal mystery. He was unlike his father. From his seaweed-colored hair flecked with white, to his sad, haunted expression. He seemed to dislike confrontation, or perhaps just social situations in general.

Such unknowns there were with these new people. Up until today, Rei's solitary interest had been working with Major Greene, and in doing so avoiding Doctor Akagi and Unit Zero. Ikari and Sohryu were... _interesting_.

-

Asuka stormed into the kitchen with surprising ferocity and tried to kick Shinji out.

"Time's up, Third… Shiebe! Did you leave any for the rest of us?" She exclaimed, seeing the four empty MRE packets on the table.

Her hair was dark now. Shiny. Wet? Shinji was still a little out of it.

"Nevermind, get out, my turn now."

She sunk into the chair next to him and picked up the foil, then muttered something in German. Shinji took another bite of an MRE cracker and looked at her, knowing he shouldn't. Asuka dropped the foil and stared straight ahead moment, then quietly said, "Just leave, Third Child. I told you to leave. Get out of here and…" here her voice rose, "_stop looking at me!_"

Shinji kicked his chair back a pace. Asuka sneered.

"You like this, don't you? You like being the strong one. You think I'm weak and stupid, don't you," She hit the table with a closed fist, much harder then Shinji would have thought possible. "They told me you saved me from the Leviathan. Well, don't get used to it. You won't be the strong one for much longer, _asshole_. Now get out of here and _leave me alone!"_ She shrieked the last, and Shinji got up and started for the door, stopped, then went to the cupboard and retrieved two MREs. These he placed in front of Asuka. Then he did go to the door.

"I don't…" he began, but couldn't think of anything else to say. He left.

-

With no desire to return to the track, and a grim foreboding of the weight room, Shinji opted to spend the rest of his time in the pool. He had another forty-five minutes before Major Greene got to torture him again, and the pool might relax his now-stiffened muscles. Additionally, he had only swum once before, and wanted to be certain he could still get in a pool without drowning.

And he did not want to sit around and think. He did not want to think about his father, or the Evangelion, or worry about Asuka killing him in his sleep. "I shouldn't even care what she thinks," he muttered as he walked across the yard.

Shinji walked through the pool room and changed into a swim suit before he noticed the face bobbing in the water. Rei was hovering in the middle of the pool, eyes closed. Shinji briefly considered just leaving, but decided that he had run enough today.

"Uh… Pilot Ayanami? Do you, uh… want privacy?" Shinji stammered, remembering Major Greene had said the girls were to have privacy if they wanted it.

"No. You may join me if you wish, Pilot Ikari," the girl murmured, not opening her eyes.

Shinji slid into the water at what he thought was the shallow end. It was not nearly as shallow as he had expected, and he totally submerged before grabbing the wall and hauling his head above the water.

He kicked underwater, and let go of the wall. Then he started for the opposite side of the pool. He was traveling along the short side, wanting to give Ayanami as much space as possible. Halfway through his clumsy lap, his left side seized up.

Suddenly, Shinji wanted very much to be a cook again. Forget piloting that monstrosity, he'd be lucky to live through the next few hours!

Paddling one-handed, Shinji made it to the other side of the pool and hauled himself out of the water. Then he curled into a ball on the cold, wet cement and found himself, once again, waiting for the pain to go away.

"You just ate, correct?"

Shinji rolled over to face Rei, who was now treading water. Looking at him.

"Yeah. I forgot, stupid thing to do." Shinji answered. "I think this whole place is trying to kill me."

Rei did not register amusement. "Major Greene will not kill you, Pilot Ikari," she said, coming over to the side and raising herself out of the water and seating herself beside him. "It would probably be acceptable to render you comatose for a time, however."

Shinji's side finally began to loosen. He unfolded from the fetal position.

"This bad. Was it this bad for you?" he muttered, squeezing his temples to ward off the returning headache.

"Yes, I think so. The first day was my worst." Rei was staring at him. "Why are you here, Pilot Ikari? Why did you agree to pilot Eva? Why do you continue to do things that harm you?"

Shinji stared at the ceiling, pondering the question, surprised that Rei would provide such a welcome distraction.

"I do not understand you or Pilot Sohryu. Eva is all I have ever known, and I cannot imagine someone volunteering for it. Does it satisfy you? Are you doing it because the Commander told you to?"

His father. They were treading quickly towards the train of thought Shinji had come to the pool to avoid. He answered her, anyway, because someone taking an interest in him was a rare thing.

"I'm doing it because it is my job. I was a cook, now I pilot an Eva. This," he indicated the room, "is apparently part of all that. If you do not do your job, you are worthless. People grow food, people make clothes, people build machines. I pilot Eva. I don't really have a reason, or..." he fumbled, suddenly ashamed of what he was about to effectively articulate, "I guess I don't really need a reason, either."

Rei was quiet for a moment. "I… do not understand. You are an individual. Like me. You embody a complex set of processes which include guiding mechanisms. Pain reception. Capacity for avoidance. Learned experience. And yet you still wish to pilot Eva."

"I... I haven't had much experience," Shinji stammered, trying to work through the First Child's dense statement. "And anyway... wait. No. I don't 'wish' to pilot Evangelion. I'm doing it because... dammit." His side seized up again. "Well, like I said, its my job. And. And my father. Well, I didn't really have a choice in the matter, see?"

"Yes," Rei said.

Their watches beeped. Rei stood.

"We have to be in the weight room in five minutes, Pilot Ikari. You should get dressed."

-

The weight training was not nearly as bad as Shinji had feared. Major Greene had started him off with two ten pound weights and had him curl them twenty times. That had been a bit painful, but nothing like the ninth lap on the track, which Shinji suspected would qualify as a near-death experience. Then the Major had demonstrated the bench press, the side-curl, and three other techniques. He had demonstrated how to use the various equipment that resembled torture devices. The Greene had given the three pilots each a routine and settled into a folding chair with a book called "The Preserve".

It had not been pleasant, but it hadn't been as bad as the run, either. It did allow him to distance himself from Asuka, who now seemed to know whenever he was staring in her general direction.

The workout took thirty minutes for Rei, and an hour for Shinji. When Shinji was finished, the Major told them to go out in the yard and see how high they could pole vault. He also mentioned that the both of them would have to run another mile once Miss Whateverhernameis finished her weight routine. Shinji's stomach tightened up.

-

Misato smiled and stared blindly at the Source through thick polarized lenses. "Nothing creeps out the mole people like a decent tan," she'd argued. And now here they were, on a hill in the Middle Sector with reflective panels and as little clothing as possible. Ritsuko had insisted on a green one-piece, while Misato was wearing a black and white bikini.

"I still think you're just doing it to get under the Third Child's skin," Ritsuko muttered, licking a finger and turning a page in the novel she was reading. "Are you sure you are completely done with the promotion work? No more forms to fill out? All your t's crossed and i's dotted?"

"Nope. All done." Misato stretched with a smile. "Besides, I deserve a vacation, right? I did flawlessly repel the first major incursion on the Geo-Front in a decade."

"No, the Third Child did. You just exhausted our conventional arsenal and wrote a shitty incidence report." Ritsuko was smiling. "But I wonder, is the Third Child enjoying himself as much as you are?"

-

Shinji bent over the toilet and retched. One does not run a mile on a full stomach, apparently. The casserole he had eaten earlier hadn't come up, but all those MREs sure had. He tried not to look in the bowl and flushed, wiping his mouth off with a bit of toilet paper and throwing it in the sluicing water.

Sick stomach aside, the last mile had been much easier then the first three. Perhaps it was Rei, who finished faster then he did, and fared much better afterwards, that did it. She knew how to run, and was not simply throwing herself forward. Running behind her made it seem less like torture, and more _productive_.

Shinji left the restroom and went to the open shower area. He quickly stripped down and turned on the water. A fresh bar of soap and a full bottle of shampoo were affixed to the shower column, next to the water control, and he used these. The water steamed up the area, and the shampoo ended up partially blinding him. That, and for no other reason, he would later reassure himself, was why he did not hear the other shower column come on.

Rinsing the lather away, Shinji checked his hands and was surprised to find none of his hair had fallen out. Usually he had to pull it out of the drain. He closed his eyes and rinsed again, running a hand through his hair and tugging experimentally. Then he opened them and saw that someone had joined him.

Major Greene stared into the mirror set in to the side of the shower column and carefully ran a safety razor under his neck. He caught Shinji staring and spared him a glance.

"This is a communal shower, Mister Ikari. There ain't no privacy here." The man finished shaving and then lathered up his armpits. "But if you keep staring at me, we are _going_ to have a problem."

Shinji understood the tone, at least. And tore his gaze away, face hot.

This place was crazy.

He quickly rinsed off, then hurried over to the changing bench, grabbed a towel and his clothes, and retreated deeper into the changing room.

-

Major Greene had given them another two hours to do whatever they wished before finishing for the day. "Just remember," the man had said. "Tomorrow will be much harder, and it will last much longer."

Shinji had spent thirty minutes in the shower before Greene had chased him out. He found it hard to believe, but the chrono didn't lie. Not worrying about water rationing was spoiling him. Instead of changing back into his workout clothes, he dressed in his uniform pants and the gray tank-top. He tied his jacket around his waist, as Rei had when they had first met.

Whatever he was going to do for the next hour and a half, it was not going to involve food or sweat. The shower had calmed Shinji's stomach, but it still throbbed dully with the promise of more spasms.

Asuka was not in the weight room. Nor was she in the yard. Shinji looked in the pool room and only found Rei doing laps. The girl made brief eye contact, but nothing more. He did not hear shots from the firing range, so surmised that Asuka was not there either, and so it would be safe to enter.

Shinji did not like guns much. Up until he came to the Geo-Front, his world had been a cramped one. The few times he could remember being present when a weapon was fired, he recalled the sound being as deadly as a ricochet. He had vague, uncertain memories of a man knocking him to the ground to shield him and unloading a shotgun angled downward in a narrow corridor. He must have been very small at the time, because the black blood that has splashed him after the discharge had seem to come in waves.

The firing range was indeed deserted. Shinji put on a pair of the muting headgear as soon as he was inside. He picked up the pistol Major Greene had used earlier, pointed it downrange, and found he couldn't pull the trigger.

He put the gun down where he had found it. Then he removed his headgear and left. Went to the track and walked it, trying to make time pass and not think.

It didn't work.

Now that he was piloting Eva, were they expecting him to... what? All that power. He could remember it. But, violence...

The Third Child wasn't certain he could handle violence. He couldn't even stand the sight of his own vomit. In Evangelion he had, he remembered doing... ripping something apart. Something alive. And it had felt good and right. But now the very idea sickened him. It was like he had been someone else altogether.

The Lieutenant had told him NERV was going to rebuild the world… had she meant that, or were they expecting him to tear it apart for them?

He did not want this uncertainty. He wanted to treat piloting like cooking. Just a... just a job. This stuff about changing the world, it sounded... it was too big. If it was real, he wouldn't be a part of it.

Another thought crossed through his mind, and everything else stopped. Mother.

He had memories of his mother, before she and his father had left him in the First Shelter. He remembered dark brown hair and blue eyes, like he used to have. He remembered a smile and gentleness. And it was gone now, all gone, and he had no idea why. It was hard to feel loss for something he could not clearly remember in the first place, but...

Father, where had he been when mother needed him? Why had he let her die?

Across the yard, the weight room flew open and banged against the wall. Shinji looked up and saw Major Greene, who was frowning at him.

-

"You should be thanking me, dumpkoff, he did let us out early," Asuka muttered. "Enjoy this while you can Ikari. Like I said, it won't last."

Shinji was supporting Asuka as they made their way out of the Outer Sector. He was counting lefts and rights in his head, making sure they could get back the next day on time.

Asuka sported a new bandage on her other arm, and a second wind that she was using mostly to insult Shinji. The girl had long ago passed beyond Shinji's ability to comprehend.

They exited the Outer Sector and into the green of the Middle Sector. Shinji had the sudden urge to take off his shoes and walk in the grass, but now without a wall to support her, Asuka was crawling on his back and wrapping her arms around his neck.

"Forward, Cheval," the red-head ordered.

If Shinji fell backwards, on top of her, he'd probably shut her up. He'd probably also get in a lot of trouble. He carried her towards the Lieutenant's apartment complex and tried to tune Asuka out.

He wished Rei could have accompanied them, but she had not emerged from the pool. Shinji wondered what she thought of the Middle Sector, how her pale skin would look in the source. The girl had told him of nothing that gave her any pleasure in life, perhaps the Middle Sector was it. Shinji could not imagine how it would fail to lift the girl's spirit.

Outside the apartment, Asuka got off him, straightened her uniform, and entered ahead of Shinji, who was by this time panting and sweaty.

Misato and a blonde woman Shinji recalled seeing on the bridge shortly before being thrown into Eva for the first time were drinking the whiskey the Lieutenant had hidden in her room. They were sipping from tiny glasses, and had formed a small tower of those glasses between them.

As soon as Shinji and Asuka entered, the blonde - Doctor Akagi, Shinji remembered – immediately put on her jacket. Aside from loose-fitting and identical gray pants, the two only wore swimsuits above. Misato was wearing a bikini top, which she made no obvious attempt to cover.

"Oh, hey guys. Greene let you out early, huh?" Misato slightly slurred her speech as she greeted them.

"We…" Asuka began.

"You…" The Second Child seemed to be struggling to control herself.

"..drinking games?" She finally managed.

Misato gestured to the mostly-empty bottle of whiskey and the tower of shotglasses. "This? No, just some friendly conversation with the good doctor here."

Shinji was _not_ staring at Misato's bust. He wasn't because both women were looking at him, and if he did that, well, it would just be stupid. He was not noticing how large her breasts were, or how little of them the triangles of fabric actually covered. Shinji closed his eyes and squeezed his temples. The headache he'd been flirting with all day was back.

Asuka was still in front of him, grasping and un-grasping her hands. If she went ballistic, Shinji was not going to intervene. Confronted with a body as trim and fit as Misato's, after being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, Shinji was pretty certain the straight-backed soldier in Asuka was being throttled by whatever inner demon made her the way she was.

"Ma'am… permission… to… retire." Asuka bit out each word. She was shaking.

"Hmm," Misato was pouring another shot for herself, Ritsuko indicating she didn't want another. "Check your watch? Face black?"

Shinji checked his watch. The face was black. Asuka showed hers to Misato.

"Oh, still pretty early. I guess Greene decided to call ahead and have them do that. You guys have fun?"

"Permission to retire, ma'am." Asuka's voice had lost its tone. Shinji edged backwards.

"Uh… yeah, sure. Go ahead." Misato waved a hand at Asuka's door. "The chrono should wake you. You'll have an hour to get to the training yard."

Asuka walked stiffly past the two women, giving no sign of fatigue. As she disappeared, Misato called after her "Sleep well, dream of something nice!"

-

Shinji lay in his own bed, breathing the cool air. His muscles were sore, but it was a feeling he could sleep with.

He had thought he was exhausted beyond the point of sleep. He had been worried that he would have to sit, alone with his thoughts, until the chrono shocked him awake. Instead, Shinji was surprised to find he was already drowsy and nodding off before he even got into bed. Misato had stocked the cabinet behind the mirror in Shinji's bathroom with some medicine, and he had taken a painkiller as soon as he had excused himself from Misato and the doctor.

Sleep found him quickly.

-

When Shinji woke up, the lights were out. He got out of bed and dressed in the darkness, sure his chrono had woken him. When he opened the bedroom door, he was surprised to find the light was out in the hallway as well. Feeling his way forward, past his own mostly-empty and unused kitchen and living room, he walked to the girl's side of the apartment. Their living area looked as deserted as his own. Then he looked closer, the room just faintly illuminated by the source.

The source…

Shinji looked to the balcony, where the source should be, burning like a sun. Instead he saw only shadows. How he could see in the darkness without any apparent source of light, he did not know. He opened the sliding glass door that led to the balcony, expecting to find a drape or some other material blocking his view of the Middle Sector. Instead, there was only icy cold air, and a sense of vast distance outside. There was still no obvious source of light.

And then there was something on the balcony with him.

A body pressed against his. He felt what might've been small breasts, pushed against his back.

The presence wrapped around his side.

Now it was in front of him, and the strange ambient light seemed to grow brighter.

It was Asuka. It had _been_ Asuka, anyway. The whites of her eyes were red, her irises jutted outwards strangely. She worth no clothing, and pressed her meager, bare chest against him. She smiled, and her mouth was full of long, thin teeth, and blood.

"You tried to kill me," she hissed.

He woke up screaming.


	9. The New Norm

9. The New Norm

The next several days passed slowly. Major Greene worked Shinji and Asuka hard. Many times Shinji thought Asuka would break and fall, or snap and attack the Major. Her hostile behavior sunk into the background, and radiated in everything she did. Rei remained distant to everything around her, and only rarely spoke to Shinji. After these brief conversations though, Shinji always had something new to think about.

The second day Shinji and Asuka reported to the yard, Rei had walked in to the kitchen in the morning, as Shinji was simmering rice in butter (being certain that this would stay down, if MREs did not), and asked him if his Eva had ever spoke to him. Shinji had replied, with growing uncertainty of Rei's mental state, that he had not. Rei had sat at the table and spoke of a dream that recurred with her frequently. She spoke of a city with towering structures built of steel and glass. Here there was no wind, she said. Here, people walked around beneath the Sun. And then she described the Sun as being more brilliant then the Source, more… and then she had been at a loss for words. She continued that Shinji, Asuka, and herself had all been present, but they had been different people.

She had described Shinji with brown hair and blue eyes, whereas she had hair the color of the sky.

She had begun to describe Asuka when their chronos beeped. Shinji had turned off the stove and covered the rice, then went with Rei to the yard for morning exercise. He did not wonder until later why Rei had mentioned this dream, and why she had asked if his Eva ever spoke to him. It suddenly did not seem like a crazy question, and Shinji wondered when Doctor Akagi would be giving him the instruction Misato had described the day before.

Asuka could barely tolerate the sight of Shinji by the third day. The Third Child had absolutely no idea what he was doing to make her mad, and had done everything he could to avoid her. Attempting to placate her would only make things worse, he was certain.

The fourth day after their training with Major Greene had begun, after a very long and painful session, the Lieutenant had announced that she was going to be leaving the Geo-Front for six days. She then said that Shinji and Asuka were both adults, and she was not expecting any "funny business" while she was gone. At this comment, Asuka declared that the Third Child could not be trusted, and she wanted him staying on his side of the apartment until Misato returned. Misato looked to Shinji in askance, and the boy simply shrugged. He had little interest in spending any of his anemic free time being around Asuka.

So Misato had the a maintenance crew restore the exterior door to Shinji's half of the apartment, and Asuka fiddled with the computerized lock on the door connecting the two sections until it wouldn't open for anyone. Shinji finally had time and purpose to explore his quarters. He pulled the plastic sheeting off the furniture in his living room, and explored the other rooms and closets. It had totally escaped him that he had his own washer and dryer, and he found clothes in the closet of the second bedroom that must have been left by a previous occupant. He also found some books and some old compact disks and a player. These he dusted off, but did not use.

Time not spent in the Sixth Training Yard was meager; it took Shinji two days to properly investigate his apartment. He did not revel in his newfound freedom, it just left him lonely. The sessions with Major Greene were exhausting, but never as intense as the first day, and Shinji often came back with only minor aches and pains. Between arriving at his home - and it _was_ a home now, it felt lived in – and his chrono black-facing, Shinji did his laundry and pursued recipes on the television in the living room, which could also be used to access what was labeled "cached internet", which had, among other things, recipes for any component ingredients Shinji could find in the Kitchen's cupboard. By the time this was done, his chrono would normally be black. If not, Shinji would watch some or listen to some selection from the repository of videos, music, and miscellany NERV had stored in their database.

Once, the night after Misato had left, Shinji heard a crash in the neighboring apartment. He had gone to the broken door and tentatively knocked, and Asuka had screamed abuse at him.

Shinji was beginning to think the Second Child was legitimately insane.

The fourth day after Misato had left, Shinji came back home and found the phone in the living room was winking red at him. He had barely noticed the phone, and had never received a call before. Phones were not commonplace in any shelter he had seen before the Geo-Front, and besides, he had no one to call. Shinji picked up the receiver and heard the dial tone. He pressed a few random buttons, and waited for something to happen. Then he noticed one a small blue button apart from the numeric keypad with a little sideways triangle on it.  
The message was from Doctor Akagi. She said that he was to be excused at 1200 the following day to report to her office, where he would begin training with test equipment. She gave him some simple instruction on how to locate her, and ended the message.

Rei's odd question came back to Shinji as he went to bed that "night". How could an Eva possibly speak, they were just machines, right? And what could he possibly say in return?

* * *

The next day, Major Greene celebrated Shinji's half-session by making him run three miles, do weight training, then, what the hell, run three miles again. By lunch Shinji was exhausted.

After a quick shower, he stopped by the Kitchen and spooned up some rice he had cooked that morning. He knew Rei ate it too, but had never seen Asuka eat anything, she always made everyone in the Kitchen leave whenever she used it.

It was not as though she wasn't eating something, though. Asuka's previously emaciate frame had fleshed out, and she grew more capable by the day. The Major had stopped giving her whatever it was he had been giving her on the fourth day. Shinji had seen the scabs are her arms, and figured Asuka had been getting shot-up with something to build up her muscles. It had certainly worked.

Shinji put the rice on the table, then went back to the counter and sliced three slivers from a dill pickle he had thawed out. He put these on his rice and ate.

He ducked onto the catwalk after his meal just long enough to see the Major chasing Rei and Asuka around the track, blowing a whistle at them whenever one lagged behind.

Shinji hoped the Major wouldn't take out his absence on the others. There was nothing he could do about it either way.

* * *

Doctor Akagi's instructions turned out to be much more reliable then Misato's. The woman worked in one of the buildings in the Middle Sector. Shinji enjoyed the walk to her office.

On the outside, Doctor Akagi appeared to work in a multi-leveled gray building. Each story to the building had windows running around it, but as Shinji drew close it became obvious that all the windows were boarded up or painted black. With some trepidation, he made his way to the building's entrance.

The interior of the building was gone. Instead there was a large pool of red liquid that extended down, past where the building's foundation should be and beyond Shinji's sight. Around the pool, which was much larger then any body of liquid Shinji had ever seen before in his life, there were cranes and objects with a purpose he could only guess at. There appeared to be rails running up one side of the building, which extended down into the pool. The only things vaguely recognizable were a series of large, narrow, tapered cylinders that rested half-in the red liquid and a shallow angle. Shinji had crawled in to such a device. That was Eva's cockpit. The voice that had described the various stages of the Evangelion's launch had called it an "entry plug".

Several people were attending to the various machines around the pool. None appeared to be Doctor Akagi. A few waved at Shinji, a wave he warily returned.

There were several obvious exits from the pool other then the entrance Shinji had just used. No one door seemed more likely to contain Doctor Akagi than any other.

He wandered the edge of the pool for a while, trying to see the bottom and watching the doors in the hope that Doctor Akagi would make herself known. Eventually, one of the technicians pointed him to a stairwell set against the side of the chamber he had failed to notice.

Thirty feet down was a door with the placard "Dr. Ritsuko Akagi". Shinji was now so far below the chamber's entrance level that, though the stairwell had no cover and he could see the building's roof, everything around him was dim. There were several lights in place, but none were turned on. Perhaps they were broke.

Shinji knocked on the door, which was solid and made of metal. Then he noticed a small button next to the door, and pressed it. He waited.

After a few minutes, the extinguished lights flickered on, and several seconds later Doctor Akagi opened the door.

She was wearing a lab coat, and beneath that a blue blouse and a short black skirt that hugged her thighs. For the past several days, Shinji had found himself growing increasingly fascinated with what the women around him wore, or chose not to. Since seeing Misato in a bikini top, he had found himself thinking certain thoughts that made him feel uneasy. From Misato's breasts beneath her brief swimsuit, moist and swollen, to the way Rei and Asuka looked in their exercise clothes.

It was an embarrassing problem, and he did not know what to do about it. So he tried to not think about it at all. Lately, that strategy had not been enough to deal with _any_ of his problems.

Doctor Akagi cleared her throat. Shinji snapped up to face level and knew she'd caught him staring.

/Um… sorry ma'am/ Shinji began, a bit sheepish. He tried to look at her face, but his gaze kept traveling downward, so he looked at the light next to the door instead. /I had trouble findi - /

/Yes yes, just like you couldn't find Major Greene/ the woman rolled her eyes. /Better late then never./

She led him into a room of indeterminate size. It was dim and everywhere Shinji looked, equipment faded in to blackness. Ritsuko's "office" was the only area well-lit. There was a desk and a couch and several bookshelves. Computer equipment was scattered over all of this. Against the wall was a whiteboard, on which was drawn figures the meaning of which Shinji could only guess at.

/This way, now./ the woman said, gesturing into the blackness, and a walkway lit up before them. Shinji glanced to either side and discovered they were actually close to the ceiling of a large room, possibly larger then the pool chamber. Where the light grew faint, Shinji saw banks and banks of what he guessed were computer equipment.

Ritsuko led him down some stairs that branched off the catwalk, and then touched a device set in to a column that supported the walkway. Bright lights flickered on, and Shinji saw they were in a lab, or what he imagined a lab must look like. There was a bank of computers, a large device connected to several tanks, a workbench with several electrical components in various stages of disassembly, and a cylinder that went from ceiling to floor. It was thicker and the top and bottom, thinning out in the middle. It had a vaguely organic look, and reminded Shinji of a rock formation.

Doctor Akagi powered up the bank of computers, and then walked over to the organic-looking cylinder and tapped on the keypad set into its side.

/Okay/ she said/come over here./

Shinji approached, and Doctor Akagi stopped him with a wave. Then she looked down at the floor and depressed something with the tip of her shoe. A metal panel shot out of the ground, and rose to Shinji's chest. This panel now separated Shinji and the cylinder from Doctor Akagi, who reached over and pressed a few more buttons on the cylinder's keypad. The column split along seams Shinji had not noticed.

Doctor Akagi went back to the bank of computers. The metal plate was still between them.

/Okay Mister Ikari, disrobe now/ she said, bored.

Shinji looked around the lab. It was enclosed on three sides, the open side looking out into the massive darkened room they had passed through. The fact that this blackness was to his left and unshielded made him slightly uncomfortable, but he took off his clothes anyway. He stopped at his undershorts.

/Eh…/ he began/every-/

/Everything, Mister Ikari/ The blonde was getting impatient.

Shinji stripped the underpants off.

/O..okay/ he called over the metal partition, now ducking to hide his face.

/Now enter the cylinder. Just stand on the pad in the middle and grip the handlebars, this should only take a minute or so./

Shinji crawled inside the cylinder and stood as instructed. The chamber closed around him, and a bright, narrow beam of light traveled up the length of his body, starting at his feet and ending at his neck. Where the light passed, his skin felt warm. Then something like a vacuum opened up in the floor and recycled the air. Then a liquid began to fill the chamber, red as the liquid in the pool, but much thicker. When it got past he waist, Shinji got worried. This worry increased when he found he could not move his legs, and by the time he started to panic his hands and arms were encased as well. He thought about screaming, that perhaps there had been a mistake and the equipment was malfunctioning, but just as he was drawing breath to shriek out in total terror, the liquid stopped rising. It was at neck level, as far up as the light had traveled.

There was a buzzing in both his ears, and suddenly the mold down to his waist split apart and was pulled away by hooks embedded in its surface. Shinji looked down, and saw on either side of his body a blue point of light. As he watched, the liquid-solid his lower body was encased in seemed to boil away to nothing, in a very narrow cut. He could feel the stuff boiling against his skin, but it did not seem that hot. He could not feel the laser, or whatever it was, at all. The lower section split apart and was pulled away. Then something clamped down on Shinji's head and face and squeezed.

Then he did scream, or try to. He could feel mechanisms working around him, tried not to imagine the horrible ways this could end, and then just like that, the whole thing was over. The instrument on his head relaxed and retracted into the ceiling, and the cylinder door opened.

/Okay, you can put your underpants on, now/ Doctor Akagi called in.

Shinji hopped out of the cylinder and had his pants on just as the metal partition lowered. Doctor Akagi brushed past him, hardly sparing him a glance, and went over to the device at the other side of the lab.

She tapped something in to the machine's console, and it hummed to life. Then she went over to the bench with disassembled electronics, turned on an overhead light, picked up a tool, and started worrying over something small.

Shinji looked around the lab and suddenly had to use the bathroom.

/Um…/ he began.

/Go outside and walk to the left/ the Doctor replied without missing a beat. Then she turned and looked at him. /Sorry, everyone needs to after a molding./ She went back to work.

When Shinji got back from the restroom, the device in the corner had stopped humming, and the Doctor had pulled something out of it.

/Come over here/ the doctor said without turning.

She was holding a suit. It was blue and white and black, and had no design Shinji could work out. The Doctor turned the suit over, and Shinji saw that the back was bare.

She handed the suit to Shinji and told him to put it on.

The material, which did not feel exactly like plastic, was still warm, like clothes fresh from a dryer. The suit had feet, and there the material was thicker, coiling around his foot and toes like a shoe. The sole looked to be made of tough, treaded rubber. Shinji pulled the suit on like a pair on pants, yanking at the legs to get his feet into place, then slipped into the arms and finally zipped himself up in front. The wrists of the suit bulged outward, and Shinji could see that several buttons and a chrono screen were built in, though the screen appeared to be un-powered.

/Fit well/ Akagi asked from the workbench.

/I… yeah, I guess…/ Shinji walked around a bit. He'd never worn anything this comfortable. It is almost like wearing nothing at all, he thought. Then, the suit became a bit _less_ comfortable.

/Okay, come over here, I'm almost done/ the Doctor said. /Sorry, I was busy with this when you got here. Damn thing…/ she pushed something into place/shorted out on me last night! …there we go./

She turned to face him, and was holding something that looked like a backpack. /Turn around/ she ordered.

Shinji turned around. The Doctor dropped something over his head, a white device which rested on his lower chest and went all the way up to his neck. The device slid into grooves in the suit Shinji had thought were just cosmetic. The top of the device hugged the front of his neck.

Something was pressed against his bare back, clicking into place with the suit and the device on his chest. There was a dull sensation as the Doctor touched things in the device on his back, and then the suit came to life. There was a hiss of fans somewhere behind him, and the chrono on his wrist glowed and showed the time, 1305.

/Hmm… good/ the Doctor muttered, walking in front of Shinji, hand posed thoughtfully. /Walk around in it, please./

Shinji walked around a moment, and found it was not much different from before, though his center of weight had shifted upward.

/It feels… nice, I guess/ he said.

/Okay, good enough. Press the red button on your wrist to unhinge it, then take it off and get dressed. /

Shinji pressed the red button, and the front and back devices split apart around his neck and shoulders. He unzipped the front and stepped out of the thing.

He dressed quickly. Doctor Akagi had appeared to have lost interest in him, she was looking at computer screens, some which showed a rotating doll figure, others which were displaying vitals.

/Okay Shinji/ the Doctor looked up from the screens /your plug-suit works. This is what you will wear when you are inside the entry plug. It allows us to monitor you remotely and should help with synchronization. It also has a basic life-support system./

She looked at the suit, which was in a heap on the floor, then she looked at Shinji, annoyed. /We're done, you can leave./

* * *

When Shinji got back to his apartment, his chrono had turned black. Apparently they did not want him wandering around, even if they gave him part of the day off. Rather go straight to bed, Shinji followed his normal routine, then sat down in the extra bedroom and flipped through some of the CDs he had found there. Most were in English and called things like "Credence Clearwater Revival", "Willie Nelson's Greatest Hits", and something from a band called "Boa".

Seeing nothing of interest, Shinji left the CDs by the old player. With little else to do, he took a shower, and absently poked through his kitchenette. There was only an old and moldy box of crackers under the sink. Just as well, he wasn't supposed to eat food not from the Kitchen at the training yard. Funny rule.

He was about to go to bed out of boredom when someone knocked on the door. Shinji opened it, expecting Asuka, fresh from the training session and mad as hell about something, but instead met a girl he had never seen before.

"Um… hello sir…" the girl began, voice a little shaky. She was dressed in worker's coveralls, had to be about Shinji's age. Her brown hair was tied back in two pigtails, and her face was covered in freckles.

Shinji realized he was staring. Again.

"Uh… hello," he said. The girl just looked at him, then leaned away from the door and looked to her left.

"Is this… uh... 18E?" The girl asked.

Shinji turned and looked at the number on his door, which was clearly "17E".

"No, I think you want next door," Shinji indicated Asuka's side of the apartment. "And she won't be home for probably another few hours."

The girl had started to blush after Shinji had corrected her, the blush didn't go away.

"Um… do you know… her?" the girl stammered.

"Yeah, I do… did you want something from her?"

The girl was clasping her hands now, twisting them and kneading them. Shinji looked down, then behind him. He wasn't underdressed, and there was nothing creeping up behind him. What was this girl's problem?

"Could you… could you please tell her…" the girl began, then closed her eyes and shuddered. Her head cocked to one side, like she was listening to something, or remembering listening to something.

"Could you please tell her to stop it? I live downstairs… with my family," she quickly added the last part. "And we… can't stand it anymore. We can't stand the screams, we can't stand the… the… it is like there is something in the walls… a skittering, a panting… could you please tell her to… please… stop?"

The girl was crying now. Shinji was at a loss. He had no idea what the girl was talking about. Aside from that one time he had heard a crash in the apartment next door, Asuka had been quiet.

"Um… when did you hear this?" Shinji asked, trying to look for a reasonable explanation.

"At night… after 2100, I mean. Always at night," the girl was sobbing.

What do you do in a situation like this? Shinji wondered. He drew a blank.

"I'll be sure to pass… that all along," he finally said.

The girl wiped her eyes and nose. "Thanks a lot," she murmured.

Then she just stood there, so Shinji, without anything else to do, closed the door.

* * *

Shinji did not confront Asuka about her noise problem. He heard her open and close her door, the walls were that thin. It did not seem likely that she could produce enough noise to traumatize a young woman, and do it without waking him up. He glanced at his black-faced chrono, and pressed a knob on its face, so it showed him the time. 1750. He sat down in the living room, turned on the television, and waited.

* * *

By the time 2100 hours came around, Shinji was asleep on the couch, television muted. Weariness had suddenly overtaken him, and since he had not heard a sound from Asuka all day, he decided it would be safe to close his eyes for a while. Surely he would hear whatever she was doing from the living room.

He slept, and next door, a terrible din rose. Something screeched and clawed at the broken door connecting the two apartments. A long way off, someone was screaming.

Shinji dreamed of terrible things.


	10. Eruption

10. Eruption

Rei Ayanami often dreamed of things beyond her experience. She knew what a skyscraper looked like, but did not know what it was called. She had seen Unit Zero long before her first activation trial. And now, now she dreamt of fire, and death, and the sound a human body makes when grinded beneath an Eva's heel. When the dream ended, she was all alone in the Middle Sector, except the ceiling and the Source had been torn away. She looked upward, and saw not the savage winds or a clear blue sky, but a single, green, glowing eye.

After these dreams, she woke up emotionally unbalanced. The dreams she had of skyscrapers, a human city, and herself and the other pilots walking around in the sun… this nightmare of broken flesh and forms screaming as fire consumed them brought her back to reality. They would never see that city, and they would never see the sun. Very soon, they would all be dead.

Rei lived in the officer's wing at the barracks in the Outer Sector. Her one room was large enough for a bed and a dresser. A sink and mirror were set in to the wall opposite the bed, and there was a narrow door leading to a restroom Rei could not stand up in. Rei did not like or dislike her room, because it was the only place she had ever slept in before. If nothing else, it was familiar.

Presently, Rei was asleep on her bed, in a pair of loose fitting under-shorts and socks. Her chest was unclothed. Her breasts had grown in the last month, and her nightclothes had grown too tight. This was the way she looked when a shadow fell across her sleeping form.

* * *

Shinji got up at 0800, which meant he was dead. For whatever reason, his chrono had not gone off, and now he was more then an hour late for his session with Major Greene, who was probably on the way up to his apartment right now wish some lengths of rope festooned with fishhooks, or something. Shinji had been half-dressed, halfway out the door, when he noticed the package taped to its front, and on the front of that package was a message in hiragana/You don't have training today, read this./ It was signed by Doctor Akagi. 

Shinji brought the package inside, and then took a shower. Afterwards, he put on his uniform and went downstairs to check on the girl that had been complaining about noise coming from Asuka's apartment. He located the apartment below Asuka's (18D), and knocked.

He heard things going on inside the apartment. Clothes fluttering, some muted music, and then the door edged open.

Clearly, it had not been a good night. The girl's hair was no longer in pigtails, and she was still in her nightclothes, a sort of purple silk shirt and shorts. Shinji was not drawn to her pale, bare legs. Her eyes held his attention. They were bloodshot, and the area around them was black. It looked like she had been hit. It looked like she had been crying. And the way she was looking at Shinji, he knew why.

"I didn't hear anything last night," he began. "I stayed up, and I listened at the wall, and I couldn't hear anything," he lied. "I think maybe you are a little…" and then he was wheeling back to the guardrail, and his upper body was suspended out and over the brink.

"You lying bastard!" the girl screeched. "You stupid…" she pressed her thumbs into his neck, and Shinji couldn't get enough air into his lungs.

And then the pressure went away. He sank down against the guardrail, and the girl fell to her knees.

"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry!" she cried. "I just… you said…"

/Okay/ Shinji gurgled. "Okay… I'll, I'll take you up there. I'm telling you, it is just a girl I work with, and I haven't heard a thing out of her!"

The girl sniffed and looked at him. /You speak Japanese/ she murmured. Then she rose to her feet. /Fine/ she said. /But I… never mind, just come on./

She helped Shinji to his feet.

/Hold on a minute/ she said. /I've got to get dressed./ Then she looked down at herself, and back at him. She blushed again, then retreated back into her apartment.

The day before the girl had claimed, rather hurriedly, to be living with her family. Shinji leaned against the door, looking in to the apartment, and saw a single pair of shoes at the doorway. He was familiar with the Japanese custom, but had never seen it put into practice before. Her 'family' could be at their jobs already, but Shinji doubted it.

The girl emerged in jeans, a shirt and a light jacket. Shinji seldom saw people out of uniform around the Geo-Front, and this prompted him to ask this girl her name.

/Hikari Horaki/ the girl said. /Now… upstairs, please/

* * *

Shinji's one chance was that Asuka had gone to the Sixth Training Yard as usual. That way he could let himself in and quickly show Hikari Horaki that nothing unusual was happening in 18E. There was no telling what would happen if Asuka opened the door. Probably burst out of the apartment and push Shinji over the guardrail to his death. 

/Why are you doing that/ Hikari asked as Shinji knocked on apartment door 18E, then pressed himself flat against the wall to the right of the door.

Shinji waited a heartbeat. No cursing, no banging noises, and no spirally point-of-view that ended with a sudden stop. Asuka was either not home or asleep. So Shinji banged on the door harder, because if Asuka woke up and found him creeping through the apartment with another person, she'd probably kill _both_ of them.

Asuka failed to emerge and kill him.

Misato had given Shinji her key to the apartment before she had left. After putting the envelope on the island-counter in the kitchen, she had rested a hand on his shoulder and wished him good luck. Shinji now used that key on the door before him, and found it didn't work.

Hikari Horaki was looking around, less upset and more nervous. "Uh, maybe they've gone already?"

The key snapped off in the lock, and Shinji cursed. Now Asuka would definitely know they'd been there.

Wait…

"What do you mean, 'they'?" Shinji asked, turning slowly. Something in his memory sparked, a faint memory, or maybe a dream.

"Well… it seemed like last night there were two people. The screaming, the sounds… one was talking to the other, screaming…"

Shinji went down the walk-way to his own room and opened the door.

What was it? What was there on the edge of his mind, showing him more and more of itself as this girl spoke?

"The questions didn't make any sense though," Hikari continued. "The voice, the voice I normally heard would scream things about the 'children of the incursion', and would crazy requests like 'scream for me first!'

Shinji's heart stopped beating. Scream for me first. Scream for me, _First_.

"REI!" he yelled, and ran out of the living room, down the hall, and threw himself bodily at the door that separated the apartments. The door frame sunk into the wall, but held. Shinji turned and ran back the length of the hallway. Hikari, who had followed him into the living room, let out a screech of her own and backed into the kitchen.

He stopped, turned, ran. This time, not just the frame, but a good portion of the wall, sunk inwards. Cracks appeared in the plaster. Shinji's left shoulder felt lumpy, and he couldn't move his left arm at all. He turned and went back to the end of the hall, pausing in the living room long enough to croak "call someone!" at Hikari, who appeared to be going into hysterics again.

He stopped at the end of the hall, took a breath, and tried to make the pain along his left side go away. Then he turned and ran, hoping this time he would succeed, because after this he would have nothing left.

The door and frame flew from the wall and collapsed with Shinji into Asuka's side of the apartment. For a moment Shinji rested on his knees, trying to breath. His right hand clutched his left shoulder, which seemed to be pulling away from the rest of his body. He hissed, and then took in his surroundings.

Only one light, the one in the kitchen, was intact. Everything else was dark. Shinji saw one standing lamp had been bent in half, the half-dome of its head shattered. The Source light was meager, because most of the furniture was piled against the balcony doors. The floor carpeting was ripped in places, in others splattered with…

Shinji heard a sound behind him. "Don't come!" he yelled. "Just… just wait in there."

In a sad way, it was like coming home. What Shinji had at first thought were splatters and rips on the floor, were actually things etched and painted _into_ the floor. The destruction looked random, but it really formed a sequence of symbols he had seen before… a long time ago.

The destruction traveled along the carpet and went up the walls and onto the ceiling. Shinji would have noticed this first, but the walls and ceiling were roughly the same color as the plaster beneath the surface, and the symbols were difficult to pick out in the low light.

There was only one piece of furniture that was not pressed up against the balcony doors, blocking out the light. A glass coffee table with brass supports rested in the exact middle of the room, and on it was…

Shinji walked over carefully, avoiding the spots in the floor where wood had been gouged out from beneath the carpet. He knelt next to what he knew was a corpse, and stared at Rei.

She had been beaten badly. Whereas Hikari's eyes had looked bruised, Rei's were puffed out. Her cheek was bruised, and her lips were dry and broken. She had been bound, legs together, to the coffee table, rope affixed to the brass supports. Her legs were just as bruised, and in some places cut as though with a knife. Her bare chest, and this Shinji took in without the slightest feeling of desire, was raw-red. There appeared to be a safety pin on one pink nipple, which Shinji carefully removed.

Rei opened her eyes.

She looked around, and her eyes focused on Shinji. She made a sound deep in her throat. Her eyes teared up. Shinji wanted to comfort her, but "It's okay," and "everything is going to be alright" seemed hollow and meaningless. He checked the rope knotted around her wrists and found it bound too tight to come undone.

"Miss…" he almost stopped, then "Miss Horaki, could you come here please?"

There was a shuffle of feet somewhere behind him. He put one hand on Rei's shoulder and nodded to her, something that, still, seemed so empty. He heard the intake of breath, counted to four waiting for a scream, then quietly said "Over here, Miss Horaki. I need you to stay with her."

The brown-haired freckled girl shuffled over to Shinji, eyes wide and not-totally-there. She looked at Rei without seeing her, then reached out and rested her hand on Rei's shoulder as Shinji took his hand away. Then Shinji turned and ran, bumping against the broken wall where he had bashed the door in, jiggling his left arm and not caring.

There was a pair of scissors in a draw in the living room. Shinji got them out, then tossed them aside. Rope, he needed something that could cut through rope. He went to the kitchen and found a sharp serrated blade that was used to cut meat. He hurried back to Rei, who now had Hikari's jacket draped across her chest and lower body. Hikari was talking to Rei in a low voice, who was staring at the ceiling. When she noticed Shinji she started to squirm and shriek.

Shinji backed off, and watched Rei's gaze follow the knife in his hand as he raised it in a warding-off gesture.

/This… the ropes, I need to cut them/ he stammered. Hikari turned to look at him, then looked at Rei's brutalized arms and legs. Shinji understood.

He approached the broken girl and got down on his knees. Rei's upper body began to shiver, but Shinji could not tell if this was voluntary or not.

/I'm not going to hurt you, Rei/ he said. /I just need you to stay still, and then we'll have you up, okay/

Rei focused on the knife, then on Shinji's face. She blinked, and her trembling mostly stopped.

Shinji went down to Rei's feet, and sawed through the rope binding them together and against the brass standing. He pulled the rope away and felt a sickening resistance as Rei's bloody flesh separated from the rope. Rei whimpered.

Shinji showed her the rope before moving to work on her hands, which were bound separately. Each time the rope was pulled away, the part that had been against her skin was slick with Rei's blood and sweat. Her wrists and the outside of either ankle were rubbed raw, the flesh broken.

As each appendage came free, Rei pulled herself into a ball. When Shinji cut through the last rope, she was in a fetal position.

He dropped the knife and knelt next to her again.

/Rei, can you hear me/

The girl's head bobbed up and down.

/We need to get you out of here, it isn't safe. I'm…/ I need you to get up and walk. I need you to lean on me and Miss Horaki and walk out. I see the wounds on your body, and I know what I need to do, but I'm not sure how to say it. Is that stupid? Do I sound like a coward to you? Shinji bit his tongue.

/I'm going to pick you up, is that okay/

Rei nodded again.

Shinji gingerly sat the girl up, then took off Hikari's jacket and slid it under Rei's legs. Her back seemed un-marked, but he didn't want to put too much pressure on her legs, which were cut and bruised and…

Shinji lifted her up, and carried her away.

* * *

The men eventually came, in black suits and ear-pieces. Hikari and Shinji sat next to Rei in the second bedroom of Shinji's apartment and were barraged with questions by one man while another confirmed Rei's vitals. Shinji wasn't really paying attention; Hikari was hysterical enough for two. He couldn't get his eyes off Rei. They had slid a shirt onto her before the security team had arrived, because Shinji did not want them to see Rei like that. He never wanted to see anyone so hurt and vulnerable, it hurt him too. He had never exactly been sensitive by anyone's definition, but when he threw his mind back to Rei tied to the table, his heart raced and his fists clenched. 

There was no excuse. There was no reasoning around this.

They came in with a wooden board and secured Rei to it. As she was taken out the door of the apartment, Hikari and Shinji followed, and waved. Rei watched them until she was out of sight. Then the men in black suits sat Hikari and Shinji down again, and talked, at length.

* * *

Commander Gendou Ikari did not keep time like most people. He was awake when he wished to be, and would often go days without sleep in favor of research and study. That is why he was woken from a dream of chirruping cicadas by the phone, at an ungodly 1200 hours. 

It was his Vice-Commander, Fuyutsuki.

/It happened/ the older man was saying. /We don't know where the Second Child is, though./

Ikari's went into high gear. Things were moving along much faster then he had anticipated. Additionally, the girl was supposed to have been under surveillance every minute of the day.

/Are the Eva cages locked down/ She would go there first, to destroy them or use them, Ikari was unable to guess.

/All three units were put in cryo-stasis after Units One and Two were repaired. We've got Section 8 positioned at all entrances to the facility. Not even the techs are getting in. But…/

But/What/ Ikari snapped.

/She attacked Rei sometime last night. We have footage that confirms that neither left their rooms. I don't think doors and locks matter, Ikari./

Gendou's mind raced. Why had the carrier gone to the First? Why not the Third/Authorize the use of lethal force/ the Commander ordered. /So long as it is in the Second, and not in an Eva, we can fight it./

There was silence on the other end of the line, then/Are you sure about this, Ikari? Are we ready to force it into a corner/

/That/ Ikari said/is why NERV exists./

* * *

It was several hours later, after the security men had been satisfied with their answers and left. Hikari had fidgeted next to Shinji on the couch after they were gone, then got up and looked to what was now a crime-scene. Engineers had come in and installed a section of paneling, effectively containing the room behind the broken front door. They had told Shinji that people would be coming to inspect it later, and that those people would slide a note under his door, so he would know Asuka had not returned. 

Hikari stared where the door had been, then returned to the couch.

"Is it okay," she began "if I stay here for a while?"

Shinji just nodded. He was trying, once again, not to think. It had unfortunately occurred to him that this was the same as running away, something he had promised never again to do. He was a mixture of naked rage and confusion.

Hikari turned on the television set.

Shinji got off the couch and went into the kitchen. The package Doctor Akagi had sent him was still there, unopened. He opened it now, and several protein bars and bottles of water spilled out, along with a blank-faced laminated notebook.

Shinji brushed the bars aside, opened a bottle of water, and the notebook.

"Confidential" was printed across the top of the first page. Below this: "This and any other information pertaining to "Project E", is strictly classified. Only the recipient of this text is allowed access to its contents. Keep this text on you at all times. Do not go beyond a 100 foot distance from this book, or it will self-destruct."

Below that text was scrawled in pen: "I expect you to read this three times before our next appointment, a day from now, at 1300. Dr. Akagi"

The cryptic language was almost a diversion. Shinji turned the page.

"Primary Control Systems of Eva Unit One – Illustrated"

Shinji turned the page. And read.

* * *

Several hours had passed before Shinji figured out where Asuka was, or was headed, or where she'd already been. He had read the manual and found it interesting, but useless. The control system professed to be intuitive, but was actually insanely complex. Intuitive perhaps if you had three arms. 

He had been reading about how to operate the video monitor painted on the inside of the entry plug (focus on a point and blink twice to zoom, use bottom left button in right control handle to activate targeting reticule), when it occurred to him that Major Greene was probably dead.

Shinji looked up and saw Hikari had fallen asleep. He went over to her and touched her arm, and told her he was going out. She wanted to follow him, using the same excuse; that she didn't want to be alone. There was more being said under those words, and it sounded like "anymore".

Shinji sat down next to her, and told her about the Sixth Training Yard, and Major Greene, and the way Asuka – the girl who lived next door – had barely been able to contain her hate of him. Shinji was going there now, he said, because he had a sickness inside him that calling security would not squelch. Security, he said, had probably already gone there and found out one way or another.

Hikari was quiet for a time, and Shinji got up, ready to leave.

"Rei and this Asuka…" she began. "How do you know them?"

Shinji looked at her and thought for a while.

"I think we might have been friends. I have only known Rei for… I guess less then half a month. I've known Asuka a bit longer. I… I don't think it matters anymore."

He shrugged into his uniform jacket and walked out the door. Hikari followed.

* * *

"You should go back," he said as they approached the Northern Outer Sector entrance. "You don't need to come with me. Go back… stay in the Source." 

"I have to come," Hikari murmured behind him. "If she… I have to know that she is real. I have to see her. I thought for… for the longest time that I'd finally gone crazy from not having…" her voice got lower "anyone…"

They entered the white-hallway world of the Outer Sector.

"I know… I'm sure you don't want to hear this, and it isn't the right time," Hikari said, drawing abreast of Shinji, "but, could I tell you a story?"

The Third Child did not turn to face her. "Sure, I guess," his mind was elsewhere.

/Once upon a time…/ Hikari began.

* * *

/Once upon a time, there was a little girl. This girl had two wonderful parents, and two sisters, whom she loved very much. They lived in a house at the bottom of a big mountain, which was covered in trees. Every day, the girl would play with her sisters. Her older sister once told her how to ride a bicycle. 

Then, one day, the world ended. The girl watched as the trees were plucked from the mountain. The girl's daddy, a smart man who worked in a big lab for a big company, put his family in the car, and drove them into a cave with lots of other people. The girl watched from the mouth of the cave as the trees near it, the rocks, the road, all of it was swallowed up by a fearsome wind. Then daddy took the girl away, and doors closed off the outside world forever.

The cave looked like the outside in some places. There were many people that worked there, and many children to play with… but the lights were fake, and the little girl could tell. The light was cold, the ground was plastic.

One day it was announced that other caves had survived, and soon they would all be connected! The girl was happy, because she had cousins and aunts and uncles in a town a hundred miles away. She hoped they would come and visit.

On the day the tunnel – that was how the caves were getting connected, tunnels – was to be opened, something happened. A dreadful thing happened.

The little girl was sitting with her family on the plastic glass, beneath the cold, false sky. There was a flash of hot light that washed over everyone when the bomb – that was how they formed the tunnel, with a bomb – detonated, and the earth shook. When everything settled, there was a hole at the lowest point of the cave, an opening big enough for twenty men to walk through side by side.

The little girl and the rest of the people in the cave waited, and they heard noises from the cave. Strange noises, like music. Then a car emerged from the tunnel, only it was covered in black.

And then that black got off the car and _ate my family_.

* * *

Shinji had stopped halfway through the story. He had sat down. 

"She… Asuka, she's the black, isn't she?" Hikari murmured. "I… the little girl… saw people touch the black, and turn around and kill other people. That… happened to this little girl, didn't it."

Shinji got up and started walking again. Then he started running. Behind him, Hikari tried to keep up, but was not in any sort of shape. She lagged behind, and was out of breath by the time Shinji stopped.

The door to the Sixth Training Yard was open. Shinji edged inside and looked down the stairwell. He went to the bottom of the stairs and peered first into the Kitchen, which looked no different then the last time he had seen it, then out into the yard. The yard itself looked no different, but the glass pane window set between the yard and the weight room was smashed. Shinji moved as quietly as he could to the meeting room, and looked in through the wire-glass window on the door.

The Major's door was open, his office was dark. Shinji thought he saw something move in the darkness. Hands against the door, he thought he could feel sound through it, something dull and rhythmic.

Shinji snuck back to the stairwell that led to the yard, and motioned for Hikari to follow him.

As they passed the weight yard, Shinji glanced inside. Aside from a lot of broken glass and an out-of-place medicine ball, nothing was amiss.

They hurried to the far corner of the yard. Shinji glanced through the door window and then slipped in to the firing range.

The gun he had picked up the first day was no longer there. Shinji went over to what had to be the gun cabinet, and found it locked. He tried to force it open, but his left side reminded him that he had busted down a door not four hours ago. Hikari had followed him in, and now braced herself against one of the cabinet's doors while pulling the handle of the other. The door did not yield.

Then Shinji noticed the desks at each shooting location on the firing range had cubbies beneath them. In one, he found a pistol identical to the one he had tried to fire the first session.

Shinji did not much about guns beyond that you point the dangerous end at bad things and pulled the trigger, and that recoil and sound are just as dangerous as the bullet. That seemed to be enough, at the moment. Pistol in right hand, Shinji led Hikari away from the firing range, moving against the wall of the yard, back to Major Greene's office.

But what am I going to do? Shinji wondered. Shoot Asuka?

Hikari _screamed_.

Shinji, who had been looking to the catwalk, and the office, jerked around where Hikari was pointing and looked at… nothing.

Hikari looked at him, then back where she had pointed.

"I… she was… a girl was right over…" she saw how Shinji was looking at her. "I'm…" she lowered her voice to a whisper, remembering where they were "I'm serious! I saw a girl with a yellow shirt and blue shorts and red hair right over there!"

She had pointed to a section of the obstacle course that was surrounded by the track. Shinji could see no movement inside the course, and decided to just keep heading for the office… but in the back of his mind, he noted that he had never mentioned to Hikari that Asuka had red hair.

Glancing from the meeting room door to the obstacle course, Shinji edged up the stairs and across the catwalk. The Major's office door was still open, the darkness no thinner then it had been before.

Shinji was overcome with a sickening dread. He should not have allowed Hikari to come. That had been stupid. He motioned her to go back to the stairwell, but she would not. She kept looking to the obstacle course, and he understood her terror.

He took a deep breath, and opened the meeting room door. He eased just inside, then shut the door and twisted the locking mechanism in the handle.

Outside Hikari froze, tried to turn the handle, tried again. She looked at Shinji, and he could only look away.

The lights in the meeting room did not work.

Shinji moved away from the Major's office, then crossed over to the other side of the room. Halfway across the room, his feet crunched on something. In the dim light, Shinji could make out fragments the color of bleached bone. For one crazy moment he was sure he was walking in the remains of the Major. Then he calmed down and recognized the broken fluorescent tubing. Looking up, he could not see the ceiling, but was certain he was beneath the light fixture. No wonder the lights hadn't come on. He slowly moved to the opposite wall, and started for the Major's door.

He had no idea what he was doing, and was pretty certain that Hikari, who was watching him through the wire-glass window, was in more danger then he was, being so exposed.

He edged to the door and stopped just beyond the frame. What if the lights were broken in the Major's office as well?

It quickly became a moot point. Shinji glanced at Hikari, and saw she had gone pale, her mouth open. She was looking back at the track. Shinji bolted for the door, unlocked it, and pulled her inside. Then he locked the door again and pointed the gun at the dark, open office.

"Sh-she…" Hikari whispered. "Co-covered in blu-blood…"

Shinji rose to window height and looked out across the yard. He saw nothing.

In his peripheral vision, something moved. In the office, the blackness was bulging outward at the bottom of the door frame. Something hissed.

Shinji edged Hikari away from the door and tried to aim the gun, but his right hand was shaking too badly. He should have called security, let them deal with all this crazy…

A hand came out of the darkness, and slammed against the ground. The light from the yard came in at just the proper angel for Shinji to see the hand was far too red.

Hikari and Shinji both whimpered.

Another hand emerged from the darkness, and together, both arms pulled into view a skull free of scalp or eyebrows or cheeks. White eyes rolled and equally white teeth parted to emit a hiss. Shinji and Hikari were both backed as far away from the door as possible. Shinji's gun hand wouldn't stop shaking.

The dead thing crawled forward again, and more of its body came into view. Its back had been flayed, muscles clearly defined in slime. Intestines squelched beneath its legs as it moved forward. Beneath its chest and chin, liquid poured.

A few lurches more, and it became obvious that the thing's legs ended where people normally had knees. It pulled itself forward one last time, clear of the office doorway, then collapsed. In the darkness, it hissed on more time, and Shinji realized the air was going out of it.

Then he recognized the thing's build.

On his knees, he inched towards the fresh corpse. Pointing the gun into the darkness, he reached out and touched the thing that had been Major Greene on the back. The body did not turn and tear out his throat. It did not float up and rip off his arms. It was now just a dead body.

Shinji edged into the Major's office, and found the light switch. He did not flip it on, just rested he finger on it, and waited. Nothing in the darkness came for him, and the black was still. The smell of cooked pork was heavy in the air, as was the bitter tang of blood.

Shinji took his hand off the light switch, got Hikari, and got out of the meeting room. He did not want to look at the Major's broken body again, but couldn't help himself.

On the catwalk, Shinji once again surveyed the yard. It was empty. He pointed the gun into the Kitchen, then up the stairwell. At the top, he threw the gun over the side rail, and listened to it clatter on the landing below. Guns… guns were not going to be worth much.

They left the Sixth Training Yard, and discovered a track of bloody footprints walking back the way they had come.

* * *

The Evangelions were stored deep beneath the Geo-Front, in natural underground cavities that had been drained of water and filled with a special bakelite solution. The bakelite was chilled to close to absolute zero, the point at which even electrical current slows to a crawl. These frozen lakes were accessible by the rail that transported Eva, or by a narrow elevator that took properly clothed engineers many hundreds of feet down. 

The engineers often said that if they went any deeper into the crust, they'd run into the asthenosphere. And then they'd laugh like they had just made a really fucking hilarious joke. Franklin Scorts did not like engineers or uptight bitches. He also didn't like being shoved into gear they must have unpacked from Antarctica, and sent down to check and make sure the forty-story tall giants they had buried down there were still, in fact, there.

The blonde bitch who had briefed them had told them absolutely nothing about their mission beyond the simple go-and-see parameter. Scorts hated that. It meant that someone higher up was getting paranoid, or they were being sent towards something so mind-numbingly terrible blondie would go crazy just telling it.

Franklin Scorts had survived one such mission, and had come away with professed amnesia and a twitch. People that went on those missions never came back. If they did, they were killed in 'accidents', before they could tell anyone the naked truth they had found down in the caves about life, the universe, and everything.

Scorts had once dated a grad student, two-three decades back, who had described how people who claimed amnesia in criminal prosecution cases were tricked into revealing their knowledge, and that had saved him from an 'accident'. Too bad that broad had turned into an uptight bitch after he got her pregnant.

The elevator didn't come with a floor-indicator; it came with a depth-meter. Scorts had found this hilarious until they passed the five-thousand foot mark. The air in the elevator grew colder, and Scorts and a few others that hadn't already secured their facemasks and breathing apparatus.

The depth-meter slowly crawled to six-thousand feet. Frost was forming on Scorts' mask, he wiped it away.

The elevator stopped at six-thousand five-hundred feet, the elevator doors opened, stalled, and then were forced open by soldiers. Scorts and his team walked in to a control room covered in frost. One of the thick plates of glass, the kind normally not found outside nuclear reactors, had _shattered_. Large lumps of glass covered the room, as did the fine frost one gets when all the humidity in the air has instantly been frozen.

Two corpses in black suits were there, one halfway out of a chair facing the broken window, the other bent over some instruments, looking the other way. As Scorts passed the last, it seemed that the man had been in the process of turning his head when he had flash-froze.

Scorts started to rehearse the trembling in his mind, the quick breathing, the headaches right behind his eye that would convince a psych team that he had completely blocked out terrible, terrible memories that, if remembered, could cause terrible, terrible things to happen to him.

Maybe it wouldn't come to that. Maybe they would call this an equipment malfunction or something, though nothing Scorts could imagine could break through a pane of diamond-frosted glass more then a foot thick. Heavy artillery, maybe, but down here?

"Sir!" his suit-mic chattered to life. "On the lake surface, three o'clock!"

We aren't in formation asshole, Scorts thought. Were is three… ohshit.

The lake was a thirty foot drop from the observation room. Some of the soldiers had gone out the now-useless airlock to get a better view. Some of the smarter ones were already aiming at it. Scorts stayed where he was, and took aim through the impossible-to-shatter shattered window.

The red-headed girl stood over a hole in the ice. She made motions with her hands, as though pantomiming using a shovel, and ice sluiced out of the hole. Beneath her was the red Evangelion.

The girl wore only a yellow shirt and blue pants, both of which covered little. She had no shoes. Around her there was an odd red dust that thickly covered the surrounding area, and if Scorts had had just a little more time to look at it, he would have realized that it was blood… blood that must have frozen and chipped off the girl gradually.

Whenever I think back to that day, all I can remember are pretty flowers, Scorts rehearsed in his mind.

Were these flowers red, or auburn? The canny psych would say.

No… they were all colors. They were white

-the frost was covering his facemask again, he couldn't see-

and orange

-one of the younger kids opened fire, the thing on the surface of the lake noticed them-

and blue

-one of the soldiers outside split up the middle, Scorts couldn't see how. The oxygen drained from his body, and blue blood pumped from either side feebly, before being frozen-

and gray

-next to the dead soldier, another's head exploded. But not the whole head, just the flesh and braincase. The man's brain and eyes flash froze. His body froze solid still standing, as had the man cut in half-

and some, yeah, some were red, doc.

-the girl was suddenly in front of him, frozen blood drifting off her body like flower petals. Scorts felt a pressure in his chest, and the girl held up a lump of meat for him to see that simply _could not _be his heart. He began to spit up something hot and salty.

* * *

Halfway out of the Middle Sector, Hikari and Shinji heard the rumbling. It came from somewhere deep in the ground, and if either of them could remember what it sounded like, would have called it thunder. 

In his office in the Administration Building, Gendou Ikari stood and looked over the Middle Sector, and up at the Source. He glanced at his watch. All there was left to do was let events play out. His Vice-Commander stood beside and behind him. Unlike the Commander, Fuyutsuki was sweating.

In the hospital, surrounded by nurses and doctors and guards, Rei spoke for the first time since Shinji had knocked down the door and cut her free. "It is coming," she whispered.

In her office, Doctor Akagi was feverishly directing a search for the Third Child, who had disappeared, and running a program to guide the emergency retrieval of "spare parts".

Far beneath all this, the dying Scorts looked through the broken window and saw the girl jump down into the tunnel she had dug, then watched the ice lake buckle and break apart. He saw the red Evangelion rise and rip open the ceiling hatch. He felt, rather then heard, it roar. The sound shattered the remaining windows of the observation deck, and knocked Scorts' rapidly freezing body down, down, to the surface of the shattered lake. As one eyeball fused with the surface of the lake and the other one slowly turned solid, just before all the liquid in his brain turned to ice, Scorts had the curious thought:

Weren't there supposed to be three of them?

* * *

Author's Notes: 

Are we having fun yet? Tell your friends.

I will soon standardize the formatting for this fic. I am also looking to see if I can put it somewhere the formatting parser doesn't, you know, delete punctuation and render half the fuckin' thing nonsensical.


	11. Immersion

Author's Notes: This is the final chapter.

* * *

11. Side A - Immersion

* * *

On the middle dais in Central Dogma, Doctor Ritsuko Akagi muttered something obscene under her breath as she read a terse email from the Commander. Then she took a few deep breaths, and had Maya Ibuki patch in the security team that was looking for the Third Child. 

"This is Doctor Akagi, acting on behalf of the Lieutenant in her absence," Ritsuko began, "the situation has changed. Upon locating the Third Child, you are to take him to the Middle Sector launch bay, then assist him in deployment. I am the only technical support you will have, all the technicians were under lockdown before this situation arose. Not a word until you find the Third."

The doctor motioned to Maya, who then cut the feed.

"What's the status of the target?" Ritsuko addressed Hyuga.

"Only 100 meters outside the cryo-stasis chamber, ma'am. At its current rate of ascent, it will reach the lower region of the Outer Sector in thirty minutes. It will breach the Middle Sector in forty five."

"How is the evacuation coming?" she addressed Shigeru now, the remaining member of the middle dais crew.

"Reporting 10 capacity on outbound maglev, ma'am. The evacuation codes are not being observed. Computer models predict we can only evacuate 73 of the population. Jersey and Manhattan UN shelters have agreed the observe common carrier treaties, so we should have little problem getting those people on the maglevs to our secondary location. The UN…"

Shigeru paused for a moment, and then typed something in to the computer.

"The UN has just broadcast a video feed, what should I do ma'am?"

Ritsuko looked at the upper dais with a mixture of longing and resentment. The Commander should be dealing with this sort of thing.

"Patch it to my station," she said, resigned.

Ritsuko hurried to her station at the back of the bridge, a soundproof inset in the wall about the size of a telephone booth. It was to be used when she was serving in her capacity as science advisor during Eva deployment.

Ritsuko entered the enclosure and sealed herself inside. She took a deep breath, and tapped in the code to connect her to the UNs representative. The wide face of UN Vice-General Gerald Shamus appeared on her monitor.

The Vice-General was in charge of UN intelligence, which meant that every time Ritsuko feinted with an intruder in NERV's computer network, he was the man behind it. Being civil was going to be somewhat difficult.

"Ah, Miss… Ritsuko, yes?" the man spoke in a brough that contained no regional dialect, something the people around him found mystifying. "We have received word that you are experiencing difficulties in Arkham. I wonder, is there some capacity in which we might assist you?"

Oh yes, indeed, thought Ritsuko. I'm going to let you bring armed men on to NERV property. Men who smile and don't leave, and when they do, the Geo-Front will be festooned with more spy equipment then we'd ever be able to disable, sort of triggering an EMP. Oh yes, help us, please.

"We are conducting an extended evacuation drill," Ritsuko began. "Though I must confide in the Vice-General that our civilian population has been performing, shall we say, less then exemplary."

If the Vice-General detected Ritsuko's caricature of his speech, he gave no sign.

"Miss Ritsuko. Let us be frank. This is neither the time nor the place to be playing games. We face a mutual enemy, without recognizable enmity, but that is utterly implacable. Your organization has effectively sundered humanity into two factions, at a time when we must stand united. I know something of the nature of the thing we face, as do you. Is this truly something you wish to face on your own?"

"While I agree with the Vice-General, that humanity should work together, I must also observe that the UN has yet to accept or offer assistance from or to NERV without making the rather unreasonable demand of full disclosure of our research. We are conducting an extended evacuation drill, this is all." She cut the signal.

Goddamn bastard is probably already readying a strike team to come and pick up the pieces, Ritsuko thought as she opened the cubicle door.

"Maya, any luck with an auxiliary solution?"

"I'm afraid the circuits were totally isolated, ma'am. Unit One will have to transverse the shafts manually in order to reach the Middle Sector."

"If he ever gets there!" Ritsuko hissed under her breath.

"Ma'am," Shigeru said. "They've located the Third Child and one civilian!"

"Maya!" Ritsuko stabbed a finger at Ibuki, who patched the security team through.

"Report!" the scientist barked.

* * *

The man in commando black yanked his earpiece away, and Shinji could hear someone yelling on the other end. 

"Lady wants to talk to you, kid," the man muttered, opening a pouch on his vest and pulling out an earpiece, which he then adjusted and handed to Shinji. The Third Child pressed the device against his ear.

"Miss… Doctor Akagi?"

"Where the hell were you?"

"We were coming back from the training yard," Shinji replied, his voice distant.

"Why the hell… why did you go there?"

"I wanted to see if Major Greene was dead yet."

At this, the security team he was with stopped and, to a man, turned to stare at him. Ritsuko, too, was quiet. Shinji glanced around self-consciously, then explained, "we went there because I figured Asuka would go after him after she…" alertness sprang into Shinji's eyes. "We just tried to get into the Middle Sector, but through ground was moving around and the entrance was blocked, is Rei okay?"

"Rei… has… hold on." Silence, then: "Rei was evacuated from the hospital. She is being evacuated to NERV's secondary HQ. Now, how do you know that Major Greene is dead?"

Relief colored Shinji's voice, despite his news. "We went there, we saw him. Hikari, she saw Asuka while we were there, but…"

The soldiers around him were muttering under their breath.

"Shinji," Ritsuko stopped him. "Did you look at the manual I gave to you?"

"Yeah… but I'm not sure I get…"

"Asuka infiltrated the cryo-stasis chamber where we store Evangelions in times of crisis. She activated Unit Two and will reach the surface in under… forty minutes. This is a private channel, don't let on what you've just heard. General questions only."

Shinji didn't speak for a moment. He glanced at Hikari, walking beside him. She was looking at him, worried.

"Doctor Akagi, what do you think I can do?" Shinji glanced at the soldiers around him, who seemed to be listening more attentively then before, though they were again herding the Third Child and his friend towards some destination.

"The only thing that we have that can stop Unit Two is your Evangelion, Shinji, and you are the only one who has been able to pilot it."

"Asuka… she had way more experience then I do," Shinji said.

"General questions, I said! We don't have any choice. Rei is incapacitated, and her Eva was stored along with Unit Two anyway. We stored Unit One in a different, off-site facility against this eventuality. However, damage caused by Unit Two's actions has disabled the rail system that would transport you to the Middle Sector, so…"  
"Wait a… why would I be going…" Shinji began.

"Quiet! The Middle Sector is the only area where we can engage Unit Two on equal footing. Remember where my office is? You'll emerge from the pool in that building. We sent the signal to drain the bakelite, but cannot confirm that it was received. Don't worry about it, bakelite shouldn't slow you down that much."

"I do not… I haven't been inside _it_ since the last time." Shinji worded this carefully.

"It doesn't really matter, kid. Look, the entry plug separated the Eva's brain and nervous system. The entry plug controls tell the Eva's body what to do, they… the body is tricked into doing what the entry plug wants, right? Well, your brainwaves can do the same thing, depending on your sync ratio. Don't ask about that now, knowing won't help you any. The point is, eventually the controls will become superfluous."

"Super… what?"

"You won't need them anymore."

"That sounds like it might not help me very much at all."

"Listen, there isn't any more time. I'd rather you had a few months of education before putting you in this situation, but the Second Child has forced our hand. And Shinji? If you fail, everyone around you is going to die."

* * *

After a series of winding tunnels, gray-metal rather then the blinding white of the Outer Sector, the security team exited into a large rectangular tunnel. Shinji had not spoke since his discussion with that doctor, but Hikari noticed that his hands were shaking. She tried to hold his hand, something she felt she needed as much as he did. He looked at her when she did this and tried, very hard, to smile. Then he slid from her, and the contact was lost. 

She leaned next to him anyway, this boy she barely knew.

The tunnel ended. Shinji glanced at his watch and tried to figure how much time he had. The number he came up with was too small, and he stopped thinking about it.

"This is where we leave you," the Ensign was saying to him. "We can operate the restraints from here, but this," he gestured behind him, to a dark room recessed into the tunnel wall, "isn't tied in to the primary power grid, so we can't utilize the rails. Central Dogma has to do that, and _their_ control system is already kaput."

The Ensign now pointed to one of several features at the end of the tunnel. "That door will take you to a hanger. If memory serves, you'll have to walk one hundred feet forward, and then use the lift. I'm giving you these distances because I'm not sure if the lighting is tied in to the main grid or the N2 reactor we're using here. Do you understand everything I've told you."

"Yes."

"Good. Now, at the top of the lift, you'll see… oh, right, is your chrono still working?"

Shinji inspected his chrono, pressed the backlight button. "It's working. Sir."

"Okay, now there's a control system up there, I don't know it, Malroy does." The Ensign gestured to a female soldier with blonde hair. "You get up there, press the button on the side of your headset and she'll guide you from there. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

The soldier unsnapped another pocket on his combat vest and withdrew a flashlight. "You might need this to operate the controls."

Then Ensign pointed to the door, and Shinji started for it.

"Sir?" Shinji did not stop walking. "Please keep Miss Horaki safe."

The Third Child turned his head just enough to see the Ensign salute him. "That's our job, son. Now go do yours."

* * *

Vice-General Shamus had called again, and commented on the most curious radio chatter they were getting from the evacuating maglevs. The common carrier treaties allowed the UN to intercept any broadcast that went through their shelters, including those from NERV's transports. The reverse applied, of course. This meant that, in addition to loading too few people onto the evacuating transports before shooting them off, the goddamn civilians had forgot to engage synchronous encryption before entering UN broadcast range. Or maybe they had neglected to do it altogether. Either way, Ritsuko intended to make each and every resident of the Geo-Front that was absent when this whole debacle was brought to its conclusion as miserable as her authority would allow. Assuming she survived. 

"Ma'am?" Maya called Ritsuko from her opened cubicle. "We've got a signal, can't tell if it is Unit One or Two."

Ritsuko glared at the large screen suspended in the middle of Central Dogma. According to Hyuga's model, Unit Two was still three hundred feet below breaching the Middle Sector. Given all the steel and concrete, and the complete failure of their radio receivers throughout the length of the shaft, Unit One seemed more likely.

"Got it… Unit Two!"

"Send a full shutdown code, eject the entry plug, and seal the armor!" Ritsuko ordered.

The bridge was quiet but for the tapping of keys. Below and above them, Central Dogma was empty. Gendou had never shown up, which meant he either trusted Ritsuko, or he couldn't be bothered. Even the Vice-Commander Fuyutsuki was absent. Ritsuko had a momentary daydream that both were shooting down the rails in a maglev, sipping champagne and calling her a fool. She shook the image from her mind. Gendou Ikari was not a coward. If he wasn't here, he was facing this on his own terms.

"Ma'am… entry plug has failed to eject. Its generator is no longer functioning, however. The armor has reported a lock-up, but is fracturing apart…" Maya put a representation of an Eva in mid-climb on the big screen. On the image the knees and elbows began to color from black to red. "This is the data we got from the armor, ma'am. I don't think it will hold."

"Send that data over here, Miss Ibuki" Hyuga called.

Ritsuko's cubicle chimed. The UN bastard was back. She hissed in frustration and went back to her cubicle.

"Ma'am!" Hyuga turned in his seat and looked at the Doctor. "Three minutes, we've got three more minutes until the armor is compromised and Unit Two resumes ascension!"

Ritsuko nodded, and sealed the booth.

The face that appeared on her screen was not Shamus' broad and innately offensive features, but the narrow face of Lieutenant Misato Katsuragi, who appeared to be hunched over in a darkened area. At the corner of the screen, the word "ENCRYPTED" appeared in red.

"Are you sure it's safe to talk?" Ritsuko asked before the other woman had a chance to say anything.

"Of course, dear Ritsu. This spy stuff is cake." The woman was far too cheery to know what was going on, Ritsuko realized.

"I heard something about an evacuation drill?" the raven-haired woman continued.

"There isn't a drill. The Second Child has taken Unit Two and is attempting to breach the Middle Sector via the cryo-stasis access route."

Misato's face went blank. "Oh," she said. "Oh."

"This is no longer your concern Lieutenant, I have the situation…" under control, well in hand, resolved "I'm doing everything I can."

"Shinji?" Misato was leaning closer to the screen now, worry, hopefully for NERV in general, etched in the lines under her eyes. "You're using Shinji?"

"Yes." Ritsuko said curtly, then terminated the connection.

* * *

Shinji pressed his hand against the outline of a hand on the door. Something inside the wall chimed, and the door swooshed open. Beyond was blackness, and mechanical humming. Shinji strode forward, and the door shut, sealing him in. He turned on the flashlight and shone it around, not hurrying forward. 

The chamber could have been as vast as the last; the flashlight did not give him the full dimensions of the place. What he could see was a lift. Shinji ran to this, and pressed his hand against another hand-shaped outline. The door opened, and the biggest piece of weaponry Shinji had every seen unfolded from the wall and pointed itself at him. He froze, and would've certainly been killed had the sentry cannon decided he was not supposed to be there. Instead of turning him into a stain, the cannon's single light beeped from red to green, then folded itself into the side of the lift.

Shinji got in the lift, and it rose.

His plugsuit was waiting for him at the top. The blue and white and black outfit had been draped over the console the Ensign had told him to stop and use the headset at. He quickly undressed and tugged the plugsuit on, zipping it up the front and then pressing the green button on his wrist to seal the front and back in place around his neck. The feel of the suit was reassuring. He pressed the headset button.

"I'm here, what do I do?" He set the flashlight sideways at the edge of the console, so light played over all the keys. The buttons were covered in the letters of the alphabet, and several were covered in symbols he did not understand.

"okay," the signal was surprisingly weak, the voice was unfamiliar. "you need to type in the following code: S as in sigma, c as in cat, y as in yellow, t as in tree." Shinji did all this. "Done."

"Okay, now press the button with a rectangle on it."

Shinji pressed it, and the lights came on. Evangelion Unit One was shown in profile before him, facing back down the tunnel. Shinji tried not to get caught up in just how big it was. It was the first time he could recall seeing it totally un-submerged, and it had an effect on him he couldn't afford.

"Okay, lights are on, now what?"

"guess lights were tied into the Eva system. okay" there was a burst of static "and get in."

"I couldn't hear that." Shinji said.

"dam- faraday -ge. Press star but- and get…"

Shinji pressed the button with an asterisk on it. The Eva appeared to hunch over, its head moving down and forward while its back came up. Armor unfolded like a strange flower, and an entry plug shot out, a panel in its surface hissing open. It was positioned right next to a catwalk that ran the width of the chamber.

"Got it." He spoke into the headset as he ran to the entry plug. "Get ready to open the doors."

"can't. same power source as the rails. just go through it."

One more thing to worry about, Shinji thought, and jumped the gap between the catwalk and the entry plug.

* * *

Inside, Shinji's headpiece gave him nothing but static, so he discarded it. Then he initiated the Eva's startup sequence, part of the manual he had thankfully remembered. 

Scintillating light, deep and near, shone before him, and then the video took over and he was suspended high above the chamber.

"Please work," Shinji muttered, and pressed both control yokes forward.

Metal screeched as the restraints hold the Eva in place disengaged as it started forward. Shinji depressed the upper outmost buttons on either yoke, then pulled them back. Still going forward, the Eva's hands pulled back. Just before the Eva hit the barrier between him and the shaft that led to the Middle Sector, he rammed both yokes forward.

The Eva hit the chamber doors fingers splayed, because Shinji had forgotten how to ball them into fists. The metal bulged inward, and as the Eva continued forward, parted in the middle and bent outward. Shinji pressed the inside uppermost buttons on the left control yoke, and the Eva stopped moving forward and kicked through the heavy metal before it. Shinji felt a ghost of pressure on his own leg.

Maneuvering through the mostly-demolished barrier, he started walking down the corridor, careful of the large rails that would throw him off-balance, were he to tread on them.

He gradually became aware of the pressure on his feet that came with each step. He moved the Eva into a sprint. The massive creature rushed forward, hands pumping from side to side. It took Shinji a moment to realize that he hadn't told the Eva to pump its arms back and forth, or lean forward, as it was now. He pulled the Eva to a stop. He lifted his own hand. The Eva was unresponsive.

Shinji tried moving his feet, encased in the pilot chair, and found he couldn't. So he visualized himself walking and…

The Eva walked forward.

Moving your feet without moving your feet. Moving your arm without moving your arm. Shinji spent a minute practicing, flexing each digit of his hands, making the Eva do a little hop. It wasn't easy, it wasn't like he was walking or flexing his own fingers, not exactly. There was something else, too, there was a thickness in the air Shinji could not taste. Then his nose started to bleed.

Shit!

He focused on a point in the screen and blinked his left eye. A context menu came up, and he focused on "Circulate LCL". He'd forgotten something so basic, and he had used all his oxygen up. Stupid!

The liquid spilled into the chamber, and Shinji slow his breathing and gripped the control yokes. The Evangelion clasped both its hands together. The air will just get wetter, Shinji told himself. I'm not breathing in liquid, just wet air.

The liquid was quickly over the top of his head. He took a deep breath, felt himself fight the urge to panic, or drink… and then he relaxed. The small fire that had been building in his lungs stopped. From the context menu, he selected "Synchronize Video Systems", and the light in the chamber adjusted, so everything around him was no longer tinged with the yellow hue of LCL.

Drops of blood from his nose floated in front of him.

Shinji called up the clock. He had five minutes.

Don't think about it, Shinji told himself. Just… go.

And he went.

* * *

11. Side B - Deliverance? 

Moving blackness, flashes of light. It took Shinji a moment to become aware of himself, waking with his eyes already open.

The light flashed again. Shinji felt closed and tired and sore. The air around him was cool and flowed weakly.

Details came to him as his eyes adjusted. The soft green glow of a cardiac monitor pulsed next to him. Again, light flared in blackness, and Shinji saw that the light was coming in from a window.

He was in a train with a long exterior window. Shinji raised his hand and held it before the dark window. Light flashed.

His hand was pink and shined with moisture that was almost slime. It looked human, and this relieved Shinji.

Then he wondered why.

He backed up until he hit the wall opposite the window. Light flashed. He saw three beds, raised off the ground. He saw one, white or at least light-colored sheets, splotched with something dark.

Lowering himself to the ground, back to wall, Shinji tried to gather his thoughts. There were threads floating around in his head he just couldn't connect to. It was like forgetting a dream, but it was more important then that, surely. He had been inside Eva, breathing in the LCL and feeling the phantom pressure on the pads of his feet as he guided it down the corridor to the Middle Sector. And then... the strobing lights of the tunnel, this room.

The slickness on his skin was beginning to dry in the cold, circulated air. It was only then that Shinji realized exactly how much of his flesh was exposed.

He edged away from the wall and leaned against the raised bed's stand opposite, so his nude body would not be shown in the moments of light.

Naked, wet, confused in a dark room. Shinji spent a few flashes of light examining his surroundings. The beds were arranged against the exterior wall, one after another, so he could not see in them. The wall opposite had a door, a mirror along with what looked like a faucet in a recessed area of the wall, and several horizontal and vertical intersecting lines cut into the wall. Drawers.

First waiting between strobes, then deciding it was a waste of time, Shinji hurried over to the drawers and opened them, starting at the top. At first he had some trouble, as there were no obvious indentations or handles to open the drawers, but then he pressed in on one, and it slid out smoothly.

Though there were two columns of drawers, those on the top slid out together. A light inside the drawer came on, bright enough to make Shinji's eyes water. Inside, things were moving around. It took the Third Child a moment to figure that there wasn't some living thing in the drawer. The movement was fluid, and at first glance did not seem mechanical at all.

There were packets of blood in the drawer, being slowly rolled around by the mechanical plates each rested on. Shinji saw each of the three packets had the name "G. Ikari" written on them in black ink. He closed the drawer, felt the motion of the plates through the metal panel.

Why would...

He opened the next-lowest drawer. These came open together as well. Inside were many bars of what was probably soap, wrapped in thin paper, and small containers of shampoo and something called "conditioner" of the "Hilton" brand, which SHinji had never encountered before.

The third set of drawers came open separately, and contained several pairs of drawstring pants and button-up shirts. Shinji removed one of each and hurriedly pulled both on, tying a knot on the pants that secured them to his waist, and buttoning the shirt up to the collar. Then he shut both drawers and opened the lowest set.

The final drawers contained some very brief shifts that were meant to tie all up the back. There were also several pairs of blue cloth slippers, one of which Shinji put on. Then he closed the final drawer, waited for the next strobe, and went for the light switch.

Hard florescent lights flickered on. Shinji squinted against the light.

Rei stared at him from one of the beds.

/You...died/ she murmured.

Shinji hurried over to her, stopped, backed up, faced away from her, bit his tongue and clenched his fists, then turned back to her.

Rei's face still bore the deep injuries the thing in Asuka had inflicted on her. His mind had glazed over the particulars of her wounds when he had first found her in that strange room that stank of blood and incantation, but now each injury was before him, and each made him feel angry and stupid and powerless.

It had all happened scant feet away, and he had slept through it.

Twin cuts ran from her chin to her eyes, where the lids were split. Long horizontal slashes ran across her upper face, cutting through her nose, and on her forehead something that looked like language had been carved. On her lower face and down her neck, flesh had been removed in a hooked kind of pattern.

Shinji hunched over the sink recessed into the interior wall, and tried not to throw up.

/You died/ the voice came from behind him /and then you came back/.

The Third Child stopped mid-retch. Don't open your mouth, he thought. You can't apologize for what happened, if you do, you'll never stop. Don't think about it. Don't think about it.

/Where... are we/ Shinji finally croaked out, his voice surprisingly rough. He turned to face Rei. /How did I.../ his brow furrowed, and he carefully studied Rei's earlier words. /I...died/

Rei rose from the bed, the covers at her neck sliding down. She pointed to the bed at her feet.

/They brought you in with the Second Child, they put you in that bed. They gave you blood and bandaged your wounds. They ran out of blood, and the Commander came and gave some of his./

As Rei talked, Shinji walked over to the middle bed. Drawing back the covers, he found bandages and some blood and an IV drip that was seeping yellow liquid on to the sheets. The bandages were un-torn, just collapsed - as though he had simply slipped out of them. Several pads connected to wires lay in the bed. The cardiac monitor on the bedside showed a flat line.

/They stopped trying/ Rei continued. /They said your head was leaking. They said you would die or were as good as dead./

Shinji looked, finally, to the third bed. The figure on it was completely bandaged. He padded over to Asuka and saw the jagged lines on her heart monitor, the insane scribbles on a second screen labelled "Psychograph". Then he went back to Rei.

/Asuka... did I... I mean/ Shinji swallowed. /Is. She. Okay? Now/ Because if she isn't, I don't know what I'll do. No... I know _exactly_ what I'd do.

Shinji clenched his fists and shuddered. Rei was studying him, then looked down the room to Asuka.

/You do not remember. I see. This is not unexpected./ At the last, Shinji twitched. To think anyone could have anticipated any of this...

/They brought you in together/ Rei repeated. /Lueitenant Katsuragi was partially debriefed here by Doctor Akagi. She said that both Evangelion units suffered extreme damage. She also said that both Pilot Ikari... that you and Pilot Sohryu were recovered from Unit One's entry plug./

As she spoke, Shinji scooped the bandages off his bed and put them under it. He tied a knot in the IV line and let it hang off the side of the bed. As Rei finished speaking, he crawled into the soiled bed and lay down.He closed his eyes and tried to block out the feeling of the damp yet crusty sheets he was lying on.

/How is that possible/ he muttered.

Rei was shifting in her bed, and Shinji imagined her disfigured face, the rest of her body. He was sweating now, and was waiting for ever strange thing that had occurred in the last several minutes to catch up with him and start to make sense.

/Ikari./ Rei's voice was right next to his ear. /Why is your hair that color? Ikari.../ her voice was different now /open your eyes./

Shinji opened his eyes. Rei was upside down, looking at him with a quiet intensity. All the breath went out of him, and he turned away and stared out the paned window.

/My appearance... it bothers you./

There was silence. Light strobed past.

/Ikari. Your hair is now brown. Your eyes are now blue. You died, then you came back... and now you look as I saw you in my dream./

Shinji ran a hand through his hair. It did feel oddly soft.

Movement above him. He looked at Rei again, looked out of shame and wonder. She was smiling at him. Then she leaned forward on one elbow, covered her face with her other splayed hand and...

Something strange, her wounds seemed to be bulging outward.

Motes of bulging pale flesh emerged from Rei's raw neck, and along the lines cut into her face. These grew until they were small globes of flesh, and then they popped like soap bubbles.

Shinji's mouth fell open. He squirmed to the middle of the bed and then leaned against the pane window watching Rei, her face now perfect and uninjured, focus on something far away. He watched her shoulders and chest, what parts were visible over the low bed partition, buldge outward unevenly, then adopt a normal form. The sound of knots of flesh popping made him grit his teeth.

When the noise stopped, Rei seemed diminished, but whole. She looked at Shinji, and crawled over the small partition. Dully, the Third Child noticed the lowered hem of her medical shift, saw the pale valley of flesh hanging there. He saw, as she crawled forward, the exposed line of flesh that ran down her back where the shift was loosely tied. The line of pale flesh wrapped around the curve of one of her buttocks. He saw all this and felt a stirring, which in turn gave way to relief. He was beginning to come to grips with this type of feeling and it was familiar. Just enough of the familiar to convince him that he wasn't going crazy.

Rei sat opposite him and adopted a position like his, shoulder against the cool glass, one leg propped up, the other folded under the raised leg. This showed a remarkable amount of smooth, pale thigh, and Shinji was once again convinced that he was not insane.

/I used to be convinced that my own existence was meaningless/ Rei said, looking out the window. /My dreams, the one I told you about, I never believed in it. It was.../ here she seemed to struggle for the right words. /It was an... ideal. Something that could never be, but was worth experiencing, if only as a distraction./

She squinted against a strobe of light.

/I had another dream, one I did believe was real, or would be real. In it, everyone I knew was dead and gone, their entire existence unwritten, and I was left alone, surrounded by enemies that could not harm me, but would not relent in surrounding and suffocating my being until I forgot myself, and became nothing but a hollow shell./

Shinji once again closed his eyes. The image she described was all too easy to imagine. Some old memory stirred, but failed to surface in Shinji's mind, just as the events of the last few hours or days had failed to appear.

When he opened his eyes, Rei was leaning forward, looking not into his eyes, but at them, at his hair. She reached out and touched his chest, palm pressed over his heart. Then she pulled the hand back.

/You are real. You died, you came back./ This appeared to please her immensely, there was a ghost of a smile on her lips.

/Now, nothing is certain./


End file.
